"Evolved in Adversity, Protecting from Calamity, Sheltered from Difficulty": The Concept of Creativity in the Jewish-Israeli National Context
Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of “DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY”
by
Yoel Tawil
Submitted to the Senate of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
January 28, 2018
Beer-Sheva "Evolved in Adversity, Protecting from Calamity, Sheltered from Difficulty": The Concept of Creativity in the Jewish-Israeli National Context
Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of “DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY”
by
Yoel Tawil
Submitted to the Senate of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
(5/12/18)
Approved by the advisor, Professor Niza Yanay: ______
Approved by the Dean of the Kreitman School of Advanced Graduate Studies: ______
January 28th, 2018 Beer-Sheva This work was carried out under the supervision of
Professor Niza Yanay
In the Department of Sociology-Anthropology
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Research-Student's Affidavit when Submitting the Doctoral Thesis for Judgment
I, Yoel Tawil, whose signature appears below, hereby declare that:
___ I have written this Thesis by myself, except for the help and guidance offered by my Thesis Advisors.
___ The scientific materials included in this Thesis are products of my own research, culled from the period during which I was a research student.
___ This Thesis incorporates research materials produced in cooperation with others, excluding the technical help commonly received during experimental work. Therefore, I am attaching another affidavit stating the contributions made by myself and the other participants in this research, which has been approved by them and submitted with their approval.
Date: 28/1/18 Student's name: Yoel Tawil
Signature:______Acknowledgements
Almost half of this project was conducted during an intense, bleak, and deeply confusing period of my life. I would like to thank all of the people who contributed to this work and supported me in the realization of this thesis during these difficult times.
First and foremost, to Professor Niza Yanay who oversaw the completion of this thesis and to whom I am immensely indebted. Thank you for your warmth, generosity, availability, and your unique eye for finer theoretical details that have made this work so much more insightful than it would otherwise have been.
To Professor Fran Markowitz for overseeing the inception of this work, supporting the proposal, and taking the research overseas. You were the intellectual and academic backbone of this work. Whatever disagreements we may have had, you played a pivotal role in my formation as a scholar and a teacher.
To my informants who shared their works and ideas with me, who allowed me into their lives, and who allowed me to share my life with them. I cannot imagine a more intellectually stimulating and rewarding topic of research than creativity. It has been a truly unforgettable experience.
To the entire department of sociology and anthropology at Ben-Gurion University – professors, administrative staff, and fellow doctoral students – for their guidance, advice, and support.
To Nikki and Adam, for making it shine brighter.
To my family and friends, especially my parents, and to Sarit, for pretty much everything I can think of.
Thank you all. Table of Contents
Chapter 1 – Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1
A Personal Remark on Creativity and Anthropology………………………………………………….....1
The Age of Creativity…………………………………………………………………...………………. 2
Research Goal, Basic Theoretical Foundations, and Hypotheses……………………………………...... 4
Defining Creativity………………………………………………………………………………...……11
A Review of Jewish and Israeli Creativity………………………………………………………………13
Methodology…………………………………………………………………………………………….28
Structure, Form, and Content……………………………………………………………………………40
Chapter 2: "Blinding Lights, Feeble Darkness": Creativity and Positiveness – A Theoretical Roadmap……………………………………………………………………………………………….42
Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………..42
Part 1: Divinity…………………………………………………………………………...……………..44 From "God to Man" to "God in man"…………………………………………………………………..44
"God in man," Children, Childhood, and Creativity………………………………………………….....53
Part 2: The Human Condition…………………………………………………………………………..56
Creativity, Modernism, and Capitalism…………………………………………………………………56
Struggle, Agency, and Resistance……………………………………………………………………….61
Analysis and Theoretical Contributions: Différance, Positiveness from the 'Bottom-up', and Questioning the Positive-Negative Dichotomy…………………………………………………………………….....67
Chapter 3: Phenomenologies of Child-likeness and Ethno-national Miraculousness - The Public Frontstage of Jewish-Israeli Creativity…………………………………………………………..…..72
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..……………72
Part 1: Child-Likeness………………………………………………………………………………..…73
The "Creator-as-Child" Model………………………………………………………………….………73
Portrait of an Unconference……………………………………………………………………………..74
Play, Playfulness and the "Smart and Useless" Idiom: Young Minds in Adult Bodies, Adult Minds in Young Bodies………………………………………………………………………...………………....80 Weakness, Defiance and Indiscipline: The "Creator-as-Child" Model and the Israeli National Character in Interviews……………………………………………………………………………85
Discussion…………………………………………………………………………………………89
Part 2: Miraculousness…………………………………………………………………………….96
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..96
Israel's inferior conditions from the Top – Down: Israel and the Conflict / Israel as a Creative Superpower…………………………………………………………………………………….....97
Israel's Inferior Conditions from the Bottom – Up: Addressing Creative Superiority in Interviews...... 103
Israel and the "Defiance of Nature"………………………………………………………………110
Discussion………………………………………………………………………………………...116
Conclusion: Child-likeness and Miraculousness…………………………………………………120
Chapter 4: The Hidden Absence of Backstage Critique and the Hidden Presence of Omnipotent Guardianship - The Backstage Opinions of Jewish-Israeli Creativity…..……125
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………125
Part 1: The Hidden Absence of the Backstage Critique…………………………………………..126 Backstage Critique of the "Creator-as-Child" Model…………………………………………….126
Backstage Critique of the Concepts of Human Exceptionality and Israeli Miraculousness……...135
Discussion………………………………………………………………………………………...141
Part 2: The Hidden Presence of Omnipotent Guardianship………………………………………146
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………146
The Jewish Genius………………………………………………………………………………..147
The Jewish genius as a parole mythique………………………………………………….………147
The Jewish genius in Interviews – An Explanation for Miraculousness……………………….…152
Creativity and Industrial / Military Secrecy………………………………………………………156
Creative infinity…………………………………………………………………………………..162
Discussion………………………………………………………………………………………..166
Conclusion: Backstage Critique and Omnipotent Guardianship…………………………………172
A Prologue to Chapter 5…………………………………………………………………………..177
Chapter 5: Cultural Reverence as Social Critique: Concluding Reflections………………...179
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………179
Defining Cultural Reverence……………………………………………………………………...182
Final Remarks……………………………………………………………………………...…….201
References…………………………………………………………………………………….…204 Abstract
’’Evolved in Adversity, protecting from Calamity, Sheltered from Difficulty’’: The Concept of Creativity in the Jewish-Israeli National Context
Yoel Tawil
This doctoral dissertation is a cultural analysis and critique based on ethnographic research that focuses on the cultural significance of creativity as a desirable and positive concept in general and in the Jewish-Israeli national context in particular. This work stems from two foundational observations. The first is that creativity is discursively construed as possessing almost universally positive, desirable, and admirable qualities. The other is that creativity is an integral part of Jewish and Zionist lore and even a sobriquet for contemporary Jewish-Israeli culture through Israel's present-day reference as a "start-up nation," an entrepreneurial superpower. These two observations intersect in the examination of creativity's positiveness in the Jewish- Israeli national context, termed in the work the "elitism-paranoia nexus," that is, an inflated sense of national assurance indebted to a cultural self-ascription of intellectual superiority and survivalist cunning on the one hand and a profound fear of annihilation on the other. These discursive correspondences and their concomitant practices as well as the interconnected constructions of creativity (both positive and negative) are explored in different settings comprising a variety of informants who are deeply involved in the vibrant scene of Israeli entrepreneurship or, in other words, the local adaptation of creativity as a global cultural idiom. The data for this work was gathered in fieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2014. The bulk of this comprised participant- observation in 18 exhibitions of innovative technology, 10 unconferences (a unique format entirely devoted to the fostering of creativity), five youth competitions, a semester of young inventor's classes in an elementary school, 32 interviews with entrepreneurs and creators, and long-term relationships with several key informants.
After the introductory chapter, which presents the work's main questions and hypotheses as well as the theoretical, methodological, and cultural context of the study, chapter2 examines its theoretical impetus, highlighting an imbalance in the academic literature on creativity across various disciplines, including anthropology, in which creativity is largely assumed to be a positive and welcome human force. My research therefore begins in chapter 2 with a deconstructionist approach to the "writing" of creativity. Following Foucault and Derrida and drawing on a wide range of
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interdisciplinary academic sources on creativity, I extrapolate several recurring themes to which the universal acknowledgment of creativity as positive may be accounted. I identify three "root metaphors":"God in Man," referring to various notions of the divine creative spark in man in both its theologized and de-theologized forms; "modernism and capitalism" referring to the importance of creativity as it relates to progress, technological innovation and the marketability of creative products; and "struggle, agency and resistance, "referring to a basic sympathy toward the creativity of the archetypical underdog and the cultural heroism of the creative person as a social gadfly. I show that creativity, as a whole and non-fragmented concept, is inherently morally multifaceted (as opposed to neutral). However, as it undergoes a process of fragmentation, its negativity, which is present in the historiography of all three root metaphors, is powerfully repressed and separated from the concept that is subsequently construed through being disproportionally saturated with its own moral valence. These ideas constitute a theoretical roadmap for the analysis of the ethnographic findings.
The subsequent chapters present these ethnographic findings and uncover both the public and private widespread opinions of creators, entrepreneurs, and the general public concerning Jewish-Israeli creativity. Chapter 3 is concerned with the frontstage of creativity, namely, prevalent and publicly acknowledged themes relating to Jewish- Israeli success in entrepreneurship. The first theme is the "creator-as-child" model, referring to the assertion by creators and entrepreneurs that an unbridled "childlike" behavior and state of mind are prerequisites for (and characteristics of) creative behavior. These are both fervently celebrated in creativity events and widely acknowledged as personality traits of contemporary Israeli culture and its creative edge. The second theme is "miraculousness," that is, the acceptance of the claim that both the elitist quantity and quality of creative achievements in Israel is indeed a miraculous anomaly – even "a defiance of nature" –emphasizing, in particular, the burden of Israel's geopolitical inferiority, which is sometimes interpreted as a present- day incarnation of the historical persecution and paranoia endured by Jews. I argue that the two themes are interconnected and complement each other, in the sense that "childlikeness" is interpreted as a prerequisite to achieving "miraculousness"; astounding achievements that are said to defy natural normalcy, such as the creation and ongoing existence of the Israeli nation-state as well as personal creative successes, benefit from "childlike" and defiant indiscipline. All three root metaphors of creativity's positiveness find expression in these two themes.
Chapter 4 mirrors its predecessor thematically, as it delves into the backstage, the more hidden or critical opinions that people associated with creativity may hold but which are nevertheless absent from the discourse in the public sphere's frontstage. Part I
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addresses the "hidden absence of critique." Here I show that although informants sometimes engage critically with the frontstage themes and the root metaphors that power them, these critical stances are nevertheless relegated to a discreet arena of personal opinions or "hidden absence." With the critique hidden and absent, the frontstage's hegemony remains unaffected. This inspires a reformulation of negative creativity which acknowledges the shadows cast by creativity's radiant light, namely, the power of positiveness to produce creativity of a negative character and to suppress its own critique. Part II deals with the "hidden presence of omnipotent guardianship." I show that the theme of "miraculousness" in the frontstage summons dormant sensibilities relating to a subtle racialization with which informants, most of them secular, struggle with their willingness to acknowledge or to accept the mythology and existence of the Jewish genius. Furthermore, I demonstrate that creativity's considerable affinity for opacity, secrecy, and infinity corresponds to the historical symbiosis in Israel of creative technological industries with the secrecy of the military- industrial complex. I show that the concept of creativity is similar to the Jewish genius and to ominous infinity in the sense that it promises innumerable creative ideas and solutions to any problem or that it can wield certain exclusive abilities and Israel's economic and geopolitical survival can therefore be securely resolved by creative means. However, these opinions too are never fully public, hence their "hidden presence," which subtly supports an optimist and confident outlook on Israel. Both themes reinforce the public perception of Israel's "miraculousness," and their concealment from public discourse contributes to a heightened sense of national security and elitism and thus counteracts paranoia.
Chapter 5 offers an interpretative analysis of the lack of reference to negative creativity throughout the ethnographic text. By focusing on the Israeli sociopolitical context, this concluding chapter conjures up repressed discourses about the use of creativity in the perpetration of physical, economic, and cultural violence in Israel against various post- colonial minorities, Jews and Arabs, and the dominance over and policing of the Palestinian population. The formulation of this social critique emerges from the abstraction of the findings (referring both to what has and hasn't been said) through which I have fashioned, by invoking Lacan's concept of a master-signifier, a theoretical contribution termed "cultural reverence" referring to creativity's cultural status in Israel. I propose to use this theoretically fertile tool in the exploration of creativity in other settings or of other themes that are similarly revered in Israel or elsewhere. Ultimately, this critical awareness helps to address repressed themes relating to creative malevolence within the field, showing that creativity plays a significant part in the perpetuation of social inequalities and violence by the democratic state authority and supports the call for their abolition.
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Since the inception of creativity studies, the emphasis on creativity's benefits have persistently overshadowed and suppressed its perception as dangerous or malevolent, although those facets exist in equal measure. Anthropology has followed suit. With regards to creativity in general, I argue that creativity's darker and even thanatic constituents need not be denied but can be acknowledged as a more nuanced, complex, and complete understanding of creativity. Finally, in present-day Jewish-Israeli culture, which is ostensibly infatuated with it, creativity facilitates the reconciliation of elitism and paranoia which enables the preservation and reinforcement of Israel's self- perception as both frail and indestructible. However appealing, this interpretation, according to several informants, may be perilous and should be considered using an extremely critical stance.
Keywords: Creativity; Innovation; Positiveness; Jewish-Israeli culture; Israel
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Note: All the informants' names mentioned in this work, including the elementary school "Beit Natan," are pseudonyms. The time frames (months, years, and times of day), are accurate. Chapter 1: Introduction
A Personal Remark on Creativity and Anthropology
I was drawn to anthropology both intellectually and emotionally by the charisma of my first anthropology professor, Dr. Shmuel Ben-Dor. Through his well-known storytelling ability, his wit, and his humor, Dr. Ben-Dor dedicated most of his introductory course to captivating his first-year behavioral studies students with stories of what we perceived to be some sort of counter-intuitive behavior. Fascinated by the celebration of human diversity, human inventiveness, and what he referred to as "the anthropological veto" (characteristic of early anthropology's vast paradigms,) Dr. Ben-Dor was interested in widening the realm of human behavior (as he believed was possible) and in subsequently enhancing the human creative potential via anthropological knowledge.This was all done with a certain deliberate and lighthearted naïveté that I,in hindsight, experience as very beneficial. Such was the energy underlying my MA research, in which I investigated the ways in which medical professionals react to medical media entertainment and the extent to which they, people belonging to a supposedly serious discipline, are willing to engage with suggestions or wisdom that may originate in creative and frivolous play. Since the very beginning of my studies, I have felt an epistemological proximity between anthropology and creativity, and therefore I was delighted to realize that there was no lack of literature on the subject.To me, it was a natural anthropological theme to be exploring. One of the main catalysts for this particular research was an experience with a friend, a composer and teacher at the Rimon School of Music in Israel where I live and work. In a discussion on the issue of creativity, he complained that he could not convince his students to learn the fine art of proper stealing:
They [the students] want to be creatively true to themselves, sincere, authentic, but the results are absolutely awful! What happened to trying to be good? I mean, if you suck when you're being supposedly creative, what's the point? I try to tell them that slowly developing your own style by way of imitation of someone who is better than you is perfectly ok, but they're not open to that possibility.
In other words, my friend's students valued creativity to such an extent that they were willing to trade competence in their craft (or, at the very least, some sort of artistic aptitude) for it. On that day, as my own anthropological formation, which emphasized the liberation from cultural constraints, clicked with my awareness of creativity's immense power as a positive and imposing cultural construct, I experienced my first mini eureka moment.
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Creativity wasat that point (around 2011) becoming not only one of the most important global buzzwords of the digital information age but also a sobriquet for Jewish-Israeli culture (in the so-called "start-up nation" endowed with the "Jewish genius"). I gradually came to another realization: it could be that I was living right here and now at the center of a potential manifestation of the admiration of creativity at an ethno-national level. This realization inspired a range of questions. Why is creativity so powerfully perceived as positive? What are the implications of admiring creativity in a culture that is allegedly saturated with it? What are the specific ramifications and dangers of such a tendency in the Jewish-Israeli national context? What would people enamored with creativity be willing to believe, accept,overlook,deny, do, or not do? With these initial questions, I began to look for more profound thematic and theoretical themes to explore.
The Age of Creativity At the beginning of the twenty-first century, creativity is indisputably the subject of a global fascination – a contemporary, globalized buzzword. This is the age of creativity and of its concomitant capitalist and modernist reading,innovation.In this era, creativity is associated with increased mental health, well-being, and even personal self- actualization, considered to be of central importance in the positive psychology movement. Creativity is increasingly being fostered in the classroom, as ever more educational programs move away from the traditional goals of rote learning and attempt instead to stimulate creativity among students. Most importantly, creativity is today being counted on to provide the basis for technological, and cultural advances in the future, just as it is seen to have done in the past.Creativity is credited as the engine of entrepreneurial and business performance and the mode in which individual or social prosperity may be achieved in a knowledge-based economy. For example, in 2009, the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, explicitly linked both creativity and innovation not only to the improvement of quality of life in general, but also to the capacity to provide solutions to the recent economic crisis (Cropley, 2010).The cultural prominence of the creative economy can also be seen in the attention paid to creativity as an academically vital domain of research. For the past two decades, a large majority of peer-reviewed articles relating to creativity were published in a single journal entitled Creativity Research Journal. Recently, in late 2015, a second journal devoted to creativity research was founded, Business Creativity and the Creative Economy. Thus,of the two major journals directly concerned with creativity research today, one is specially devoted to attempts to employ creative abilities for the purpose of business-related endeavors and organizational psychology, such as increasing creativity in the workplace and in the blossoming creative economy more generally.
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This interest exemplifies the capitalist fascination with creativity as it relates both to creative products and to the discovery and cultivation of methods that may lead to them. This capitalist interest is specifically oriented toward technological entrepreneurship. We live in an era of rapid economic transformations: the shift to post- Fordism and neoliberal economic forms both produces and is facilitated by the emergence of networked information technologies symptomatic of globalization processes and the predominance of the internet. The constant and simultaneous transnational exchanges of knowledge, commerce, and finance between nation-states, much like the eponymous "information" in the term "information age", imply the end of place, the creation of new places, and the greater interconnectivity between places. Even more specifically, this is the age of Facebook, Wiki, YouTube, TED Talks – a globalized flux of information, accessible infotainment, an e-commerce consumerist culture, and digital gadgetry through which technology becomes part of the normal human experience. The cultural heroes of this era are the entrepreneur-creators, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and many such others. Some of these share grandiose visions of creative technological utopias embodied in projects such as the colonization of space, missions to save the environment and the economy, or prophesies of transhumanist aspirations. Hype becomes creative vision and entrepreneurial venture becomes heroic leadership, more perhaps than ever before. Israel holds a special place in this fascination. The self-perception of the nation- state resides in a paradoxical or cyclothymic discourse that is officially endorsed and popularly acknowledged. On the one hand, Israel is considered a "surviving state" – very small, bereft of natural resources, and forever threatened by a hostile and ever more unstable geopolitical environment. On the other hand, in the field of technological innovation, Israel is presented as a "thriving state", a "start-up nation", to use the term coined by Dan Senor and Saul Singer in their 2009 influential book of the same name. Since the mid-1990s, state and unofficial internet sites and press reports have promoted and positioned Israel as a Western,modern, and technologically-advanced enclave, in ongoing contrast to its neighbors. Such information is accessible and pervasive;for example, a Google search performed in August 2017 of "Israel creativity" generates 14 million listings, considerably more than "Denmark creativity" (12 million) and roughly half the number of listings when searching for creativity paired with names of larger and more populated countries (e.g., Australia) andfar more affluent countries (e.g., Switzerland). Furthermore, the very first listings that relate to Israel refer to technological innovation and Israel's culture of creativity, while the first listings shown in a search of "Egypt creativity" (10 million listings) are concerned with issues such as Egypt killing its creativity, coping with poverty, and the manufacture of handicrafts. Israelis are frequently reminded, primarily through media reports, that Israel has one of the largest number of patents per capita and other global innovation indices as part of a
3 general wealth of success stories.These are all understood as proof of Israel's ability to transcend its challenges as a "surviving state, emplotting Israel's achievements in a narrative of exceptionalism endowed with a miraculous aura. In such instances, the Hebrew phrase "geava yisraelit" (Israeli pride) can be heard or read each and every time. Some state-supported institutions nurture the highest hopes for Israel becoming a leading global innovation center.Others work to convert these exploits into a positive image of Israel for international promotion or for self-congratulatory purposes at home. For example, during the festivities for Israel's 67th Independence Day in 2015, the official ceremony highlighted the theme of "groundbreaking" Israelis,that is, Israelis who have achieved unusual and inspiring accomplishments and contributed significantly to innovation and excellence in diverse areas such as science and technology, security, economy, agriculture, culture, and sports. In the traditional army drills that take place during the ceremony, the soldiers created various formations, many representing the inventions and technologies widely perceived as providing an answer to Israel's security challenges and economic frailty. The soldiers created the images of an unmanned aircraft, the USB flash drive, the Iron Dome (anti-rocket defense system), and finally, the symbol of Waze, the Israeli company that created a navigation program and was sold in 2013 to Google for the then unheard-of sum of 1.1 billion dollars (Yanovski, 2015). This achievement wassurpassed in 2017, when Intel acquired the Israeli company Mobileye for the sum of 15.3 billion dollars. While important, the connection of creativity and Israeliness cannot be limited solely to innovation in a knowledge-based economy. Creativity is present in Israel through Jewish-Israeli culture in the broadest sense of the term. This includes biblical stories and survivalist diasporic folktales merged into contemporary national identities, self-perceptions of intellectual superiority and other specific characteristics,and narratives of state-building and sustaining punctuated by pivotal historical events. It is around this theme that this ethnography-based dissertationdiscusses the prominenceof creativity in Israel. It focuses on present-day practices, discourses, and achievements, located within the larger cultural context that informs them.This work is not, however, solely an ethnographic exploration of Jewish-Israeli creativity but builds on it to formulate an analytical critique of creativity, which can be equally destructive and constructive in present-day Israel. This destructiveness, either in itself or powered by its own positiveness, is addressed below.
Research Goal, Basic Theoretical Foundations,and Hypotheses The aim of this research relates to two interconnected issues.The first goal is to provide a critical ethnographic analysis of the discourses and practices through which creativity is constructed as a significant national cultural resource of Jewish-Israelisociety. The second goal is to provide a critical examination of the positiveness of creativity:its
4 significance, use, and possible abuse both locally and globally. By positiveness I am referring to the cultural strands that discursively construct creativity as imperatively positive and desirable.This construct is theoretically approached with a deconstructionist general disposition, as I assert that creativity and positiveness do not naturally overlap. Both goals of this research, each in their respective domain, explore uncharted thematic and theoretical territory. My goals are underwritten by two foundational observations. The first, relating to creativity's positiveness as the subject of global fascination, is that creativity today is important, a term virtually interchangeable with positive. A powerful example of this can be found in Forgeard and Kaufman's (2016) review of 200 peer-reviewed empirical studies of creativity, innovation, and imagination, published between 2009 and 2012. The authors contended that researchers in these fields do not explain why their research is important, suggesting that most researchers assume that their readership already shares the perspective that creativity is worth being studied and enhanced.The second observation is that Israel's present-day self-perception – mainly through the recent "start-up nation" idiom but also through the historiography and mythology of both the ethnos and the nation-state – consists of a culture of innovation that is highly beneficial as it relates to globalization. Thus, creativity's prominence in this cultural context is important not only in Jewish-Israeli culture in and of itself but also in response to a creative ethos of basically American origin. This ethos, whether addressing the state or the individual, travels through globalization channels to become eventually re- territorialized in Israel in a process resembling what Hannerz (2002) called "maturation," through which "imported cultural items, with time, come to be taken apart, tinkered and tampered with in a manner more in line with a culture of fundamentally local character" (p.43). In this sense, this research is concerned with culture for two main reasons.The first reason is that culture is the means through which positive recognition or,to use Bourdieu's (1977) term, Westernized symbolic capitalcan be used to claim a valuable place on the global scene (Markowitz, 2004). The second reason is that culture plays a crucial role in shaping the fictional aspects of national identity in its public and private dimensions as a complex interaction of strategies and tactics (Anderson, 1983; Hobsbawm, 1983). Having introduced some foundational observations, I now elaborate on the purpose of the research. My first goal, as mentioned above,is an ethnographic critical analysis of the discourses and practices through which creativity is constructed as a significant cultural resource of Jewish-Israeli society. The question of the cultural linkage between creativity, the Israeli state-building project, and the nation-state's status as a creative entrepreneurial superpower, although quite often discussed in formal and informal settings, has not yet been explored through ethnographic study. This research targets ethnographically the community to which this creative superpower status is
5 indebted and, following the anecdotal lines mentioned in the preface, hypothesizes that creativity plays an essential role in a variety of issues of anthropological interest in Israeli society. These issues are expected to be addressed differently, since people, even if belonging to overlapping social circles, are neither passive nor homogeneous consumers of culture. The issues include the reformulation and enrichment of the concepts of Israeliness and Jewishness and comprise their boundaries and social hierarchies as informed by globalization processes and neoliberal economic tendencies as well as related themes such as ethno-nationalism, militarism, self-perceptions of cultural personality, and the extent of popular religious adherence. Yet, more specifically, by drawing on Israel as being discursively perceived and as emerging from and being sustained by Jewish and Israeli creativity, this research contends that in this particular challenging cultural context, various creative endeavors possess an enhanced awe-inspiring quality. I argue that this quality inspires political uses and theoretical implications that affect the Jewish and Zionist ethos,what I refer to as the Jewish-Israeli elitism-paranoia nexus. Both elitism and paranoia aremulti-vocal in this work and are also interdependent, so neither can be defined in its traditional sense. By elitism, I do not mean a ruling controlling few but a softer version of "collective narcissism" as formulated by Fromm– an inflated cultural self-worth of the in-group (Funk, 2000). By paranoia, I am not referring to an actual psychological paranoid state but a metaphor for a meta-historical general perception of the world's hostility.The two – elitism and paranoia – interconnect. Aside from Fromm, other post-war theoreticians, notably Arendt (1971) and Adorno (1998),suggested that an idealization of a group may be a strategy to protect a weak ego (or an actual physical threat). Therefore,this nexus comprises a primary axis of elitism and paranoia, intersected and thematically enriched by a secondary axis which refers to weakness and strength. These continuums compose a geometrical landscapethatoffers a variety of historical, political, and cultural outlooks on Jews and Israelis, located between various extremities of indestructibility on the one end and annihilation on the other. These social categories may be paranoid and weak (for example, the frightened Diaspora Jewor the 1973 war's sense of impending doom); paranoid and strong (for example,Israel as a military superpower ever threatened by war); elitist and weak (for example, the intellectual and cunning Diaspora Jew who outsmarts the Gentile); and elitist and strong (for example, the euphoria following the 1967 war or the "start-up nation" idiom). More complex combinations may be proposed: Israel may be considered elitist but both weak and strong in its claim to belong among the most civilized nations rather than the neighboring and outnumbering Arab states of the Middle East.This nexus is explored thematically in this chapter in the historical review of Jewish-Israeli creativity and in more depth in the following chapters through ethnography and its following analysis.
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The second goal of this research involves a critical exploration of the significance of creativity's positiveness in relation to both the specific Jewish-Israeli cultural contextand,more broadly, a cultural construct almost universally perceived as positive.It is important to note that I am not referring to creativity as inherently or naturally positive butrather as a cultural construct. Creativity can and historically has been harnessed for evil purposes, but it is not easily associated with them. For instance, the creative brilliance of Nazi Germany in the wide sense of the term is not comfortably invoked by the term "creativity". The discursive moral compartmentalizing of such a concept cannot occur in a theoretical void. Post-structuralist approaches and ideas, especially the premise that language can never convey absolute meaning and the subsequent interest in what has been left out, glossed over, or covered up, is particularly useful. Specifically, I rely on Derrida's (1982)"différance" to account for creativity's positiveness. According to Nuyen (1989), Derrida inverted the usual intuition that the whole cannot exist without its parts to say instead that the parts cannot exist without the whole. Following this line of thought, the process of writing entails conceptualizing a "present" part that is opposed to other "absent" or repressed parts,which together constitute a "whole";it is accepting one meaning out of a polysemia, a plurality of meanings (Plotnitsky, 2004; Wheeler, 1999). From a moral standpoint, the meaning of creativity is, by definition, not a series of fragmented meanings that refer to a spectrum of equally valid moral and immoral possibilities.Of these, only some, those evaluated as positive, are sampled, reassembled, and posited against those not. This fashions a positive morality of creativity that appears to be normal "truth." Derrida's concept of différance is, in this sense, a philosophical and analytical companion to anthropological studies of absence. In line with Derrida, anthropological studies of absence have remarked that significance is created through heterogeneity, adding an emphasis in social realities (Bille, Hastrup, & Sorensen, 2010). Not only is meaning not (only) in a given phenomenon itself, it is also in what it is not, and this process impacts the social, emotional and material lives of people. Indeed, creativity, as shown in Chapter 2, is about positiveness just as much as it is about negativity's absence (negativity as positiveness' différance in the Derridean sense). In the ethnographic chapters, I show how this basic conceptualization of creativity impacts my informants' lives, speech, and practices as Israeli Jews in relation to the concept and meaning of creativity as a cultural force. Though, as Fowler (2010) noted, many anthropological studies of absence tend to somewhat focus on material culture (such as in the wake of catastrophes), my approach in using the term is different. My informants make sense of creativity by underscoring intense positiveness and omitting any mention of creativity's negativity (its différance), despite the fact that all moral aspects of creativity are inherent constituents of the concept. Absence in my work therefore refers to the lack of "wholeness" of concepts as used by people. In this case,
7 creativity overlaps with positiveness, and according to Derrida's linguistic approach, by using one meaning in this discursive congruence, other meanings hide (or surface) in speech. In other words, speech is always already an act of access to meaning and a simultaneous lack of other subtextual undercurrents that nevertheless can be detected in the contradictions, omittances, and linguistic inaccuracies with which the concept is used (Derrida, 2001). Therefore, this work does not only seek the straightforward meaning of creativity but also pays attention to what is not being said when the concept is discussed and experienced and to its possible interpretations. In terms of absence, this research focuses on the absence of direct speech regarding the negative character of creativity that is always part of its positiveness.
In order to properly address this selective process from the deconstructionist viewpoint, Chapter 2 offers an in-depth and detailed review of the academic literature on creativity and the popular discourses that it reflects. In this review, which plots a theoretical roadmap for the ensuing ethnographic chapters, I show that anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers, and researchers in the "hard" sciences have generally lauded creativity without qualification as a positive, empowering, and morally desirable scientific and artistic force. In Derrida's terms, by "writing" creativity (literally and theoretically), they wrote off its polysemia and established its positiveness. Relatively few of these scholars have addressed the "dark side" of creativity, and, still following Derrida, to the extent that the dark side is addressed, the corpus of literature (which is still in its infancy) is mostly dichotomous. It contrasts a largely present benevolent creativity with a largely absent malevolent or negative creativity and enables the former to be acknowledged as the supposedly widest known or sole legitimate definition of the term, in other words, creativity as a solid construct saturated with positiveness. This emphasis is clearly also reflected in my informants' discourse. In their narratives of creativity they represent the common scientific and cultural meanings that are part of the Israeli educational and military system which is benefited by creativity. Hence, I treat malevolence and negativity as repressed features of creativity, and the most engaged use of the term repression can be found in the last chapter. Derrida uses repression or absence to note what is omitted from speech (or text) yet is present by its very omission (Watkin, 2009). My use of the term concerns the interpretation of contradictions, silences, omissions, paradoxes, and ambivalence in the text1.These interpretations, however, are (following the Derrridean tradition) open to further reinterpretations.
1 The question of repression in written texts and deconstruction as a method of texual reading, became part of what can be called the "science wars" in the social sciences. Some of the critique against interpretation and metaphorical paradigms, of which Derrida was well-aware, was directed towards his own work (more on that issue see Gross, 2013 ; Gross & Levitt, 1994 ;Sokal & Bricmont, 1997; Yancey, 2015). My use of the term repression is rooted in the understanding of this debate.
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The current research focuses on the theoretical implications of creativity's positiveness as they relate to creativity studies and its adaptation insofar as Jewish- Israeli culture is concerned – some more latent, subtle, and rather less obvious. Several hypotheses underlie this line of thought. First is the assumption that the dialogue between the theoretical roadmap and the ethnographic data will inform, enrich, and refine the literature regarding creativity's positiveness,providing insights into how creativity "works" via various case studies replete with critical perspective. The second hypothesis derives from the anthropological tradition (embodied in the ethnographic case studies), which obliges us to criticize the static elegance of cultural portraits in favor of cultural configurations of a more dialectical or relational nature. I rely on a fundamental metaphor that is used throughout the presentation of the ethnography and its analysis:the primordial distinction between light and darkness, with light denoting public realms and positiveness and darkness representing private and discreet arenas and negativity or malevolence. A major hypothesis of this research is therefore that creativity's angelic aura is not simply benevolent but rather possesses the capacity to lead to results that may be evaluated as negative. In other words, positiveness radiates while simultaneously casting a "shadow". In this respect, I draw inspiration from critics of the positive psychology movement, who pointed out the dangers of optimism and positive thinking (Ehrenreich, 2009; Gruber, Mauss, &Tamir, 2011) or who, conversely,detailed the undetected benefits of negative experiences (Held, 2004; Ivtzan, Lomas, Hefferon, & Worth, 2016; Vasquez, 2011). This research is not, I should clarify, concerned with what may be termed "thanatic" (that is, negative or malevolent) creativity in itself but rather with capturing the dynamic complexities of the realities in which this seemingly one-dimensional cultural category operates. Such complexities enable a critical reevaluation or nuanced replacement of the current dichotomy that posits an absolute split between benevolence and malevolence and implies a category of "shadowy creativities" that is neither enlightened nor horrifying. In the present-day cultural context relating toJewish-Israeli nationalism,which is torn between chauvinist and liberal political agendas, the tribal past, and the global present and future and characterized by ethno-colonial moral failures that are nevertheless tempered by democracy, I evaluate this critical perspective as this study's main contribution. The third and final hypothesis relating to the dark side of creativity concerns a somewhat skeptical approach to the immediate and exclusive association of the term "dark" with malevolence or maleficence. I am thematically inspired by the growing popularity of the Darknet, the more restricted overlaying network of the creative internet. Alongside a wide range of computer crimes, drug dealing, and arms trafficking, the Darknet also ensures the anonymity and subsequent protection of political dissidents and whistle-blowers and provides a platform for the formation of various experimental alliances and sharing of knowledge that wouldn't be otherwise possible (Kushner, 2015).
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I therefore assume, without imposing an a priori moral judgement on this condition,that, alongside the possibility of malevolence, dark may also refer to a state of being hidden or to inaccessible realms of creative activity. These issues, while being of a more abstract and theoretical nature, merge with the explorative goal of understanding creativity in the Jewish-Israeli cultural context. The two particular goals that inform the raison d'être of this research –creativity in the Jewish-Israeli national context and creativity's positiveness –interlock through this study's ethnographic nature. The Jewish-Israeli cultural scene is unique insomuch as it is fraught with a wide range of references to creativity, which, as mentioned earlier, are generally considered to be tremendously beneficial. Such a cultural setting represents a departure from much of the anthropological research on creativity2 which is often characterized by etic interpretations of various cultural phenomena as creative. While this is undoubtedly the case in the current research, creativity is alsopartof an emic discourse. Creativity rendered palpable through a multiplicity of cultural narratives of relevance enables an ethnographic investigation of both cultural manifestations of creativity and of creativity as a cultural manifestation of its social being. Ricoeur (1980) argued that researching narratives provides a lens or a window through which social life – in this case, the social life of creativity as a positive cultural entity – may best be studied. Researching creativity in Israel is therefore advantageous,since insightful constituents lifted from the analysis of Israeli particularity may illuminate creativity as a universal concept. Laidlaw (2014), in his anthropological investigation of ethics and virtue, followed a similar train of thought. While the "positiveness" attributed to creativity is not necessarily synonymous with "virtue," I agree with his proposal to merge philosophy with an ethnographic stance for the purpose of empirically studying actual morality. Such an endeavor, he claimed, requires the description of the relevant cultural categories and values, the moral psychology of which they are a part, the practices to which they relate, and the contexts and relationships in which they are acquired and used. This is, in other words, a thick description of a form of moral life in exactly the sense in which, according to Geertz's (1973a) influential formulation, a good ethnographic description is thick. This entails the exploration of Jewish-Israeli creativity as a complex nexus, which – like any complexity of human activities – is most likely to be reflected in or revealed through firsthand contact with the hearts, minds, words, and actions of real people. This firsthand contact also informs my more abstract and theoretical assessment of creativity's positiveness. Both the analysis and critique of Jewish-Israeli creativity and the theoretical development of creativity's positiveness
2I refer specifically to the four anthropological edited volumes directly concerned with creativity that have been published to date, Hallam &Ingold (2007);Lavie, Narayan, &Rosaldo (1993), and Liep (2001), followed by Moeran's (2014) analysis of ethnographic examples of the cultural production of physical items in terms of their accompanying social processes.
10 derive from the same fieldwork-based methodology, and their respective insights are based on the same ethnographic data. In this sense, they are the same.
Defining Creativity Having established that creativity in the wide sense of the term is constructed as positive, I now elaborate on several theoretical and disciplinary approaches relevant to the definition of the concept of creativity, which are neither obvious nor consensual. The definition of creativity for the purpose of this research derives from this discussion. Callahan and Stack (2007) observed that much like defining culture, defining creativity is a daunting and troublesome task. Most of the many definitions of creativity found in the academic literature emphasize one or more of three facets of creativity: the process, the product, and the social acceptance. Some are highlighted and others downplayed, depending on the domain of reference, the cultural context, and other variables. Some notable and popular definitions of creativity display a preference for highlighting the creative process, for example,Koestler's (1964) concept of "bisociation" – an association of at least two apparently unrelated or incompatible modes of thought – and Csikszentmihalyi's (1996) concept of "flow" – the intensely focused performance of an activity as a gateway to a heightened creative mental state. However, the most common interpretation of creativity aligns itself with a capitalist reading of creativity (as can be expected in a celebration of creativity as it relates to economic enterprise) and accentuates the product and its social acceptance. This is expressed in the widespread definition of creativity as the production (often termed "creation" in such contexts) of something (the product) which is both "novel" and "useful" (i.e., socially accepted),with "useful" often interchangeable with "adaptive," "marketable," and "of value" (Amabile, 1988 ; Cropley, Kaufman, & Cropley, 2008; Martindale, 1994; Nickerson, 1999; Pope, 2005; Richards, 1999; Sternberg & Lubart, 1999). This inclination has been noted to be a predominant characteristic of "Western" cultures in contrast to "Eastern" conceptions of creativity that are more interested in the role of creativity in personal self-fulfillment and enlightenment or its connection to an inner realm of reality (Albert & Runco, 1999; Lubart, 1999; Westwood & Low, 2003). Anthropologists, for their part, have traditionally defined creativity differently. While not undermining the product and its value, their emphasis has been more on the process perceived as integral to humanness and life, which does not necessarily end in a celebrated positive anomaly. Both Levi-Strauss' (1966) distinction between engineers and bricoleurs and Geertz's (1988) distinction between authors and writers implied a difference in quality between different creative mindsets but nevertheless acknowledged that some form of creative process is embedded in the agency of every human. This is especially true regarding Levi-Strauss' concept of bricolage, which denotes the working process of (re)combining existing materials within a framework of rules as a universal
11 cognitive and cultural phenomenon. In the same vein, human creativity has been identified in human relations to culture, for instance, in the ability to engage in the heterogeneous interpretation of cultural symbols (Obeyesekere, 1981) and, more generally, in the human expressive ability to create culture (Wagner, 1981), including the imaginative and linguistic relationship to the shaping of the material universe (McLean, 2009). Human creativity as a process has also been noted as a fundamental and non- coincidental constituent of human action (Joas, 1996) or as a complement to the implicit knowledge that overcomes the minor disruptions that occur in various mundane activities (Borofsky, 2001). Ingold and Vergunst (2008) went even further by viewing creativity as the most basic attribute of being human, a creativity demonstrated even in the diversity of people's ways of walking, that is, creativity insinuated in the very tissues of the living human body. This anthropological tendency characterizes the introductory essays in the volumes relating to creativity from an anthropological perspective. Rosaldo, Lavie, and Narayan (1993) proposed a definition of creativity as "human activities that transform existing cultural practices in a manner that a community or certain of its members find of value" (p.5). Liep (2001) defined creativity as "an activity that produces something new through the recombination or transformation of existing cultural practices or forms" (p.2).With emphases on social acceptance in the case of the former and on the product in the latter,both of these definitions explicitly mentioned human activities, in other words, the process. More recently, Moeran (2014) offered a somewhat different perspective, concerned not with the"what" of creativity but rather with the "when." His analysis focused on the social process involved in the fashioning of cultural items and their worth (namely,social acceptance), and he therefore emphasized the process alongside the product and the approval. Hallam and Ingold (2007) emphasized the process even more, claiming that to read creativity as innovation (as Liep [2001] implied) is to read it "backwards" in terms of its results and products instead of "forwards" in terms of the movements (the process) that gave rise to them. They claimed that such a backwards reading, which clearly expresses greater interest in the production of new commodities, is symptomatic of capitalist modernity. For the purposes of the current research – an ethnographical exploration of present-day Israel's capacity for inventiveness in a knowledge-based global economy with a concomitant focus on of other aspects of creativity – I combine both the capitalist readings of creativity with the anthropological contribution that emphasizes the process. I therefore present my own definition of creativity for the purposes of this research as "any activity, phenomenology, movement, or production of something new,explicitly identified by an individual or a community as characteristic of creativity and acknowledged as valuable in some way." I emphasize "explicitly" and "valuable" (either morally commendable or questionable) in order to prevent this definition of creativity
12 from becoming a catchall term. It isusing this definition that I explore creativity's singular position in Jewish-Israeli culture and its particular allure as well as any shadows cast by a cultural construct shaped as sointensely positive.
A Review of Jewish and Israeli Creativity While two foundational bases –creativity's asserted positiveness and definition –have been presented, a third foundation linking the benefits of creativity as I defined it with the local, culture-specific, and ethno-nationalist inclined major narratives of creativity is missing. This section therefore offers a review of the academic literature that relates to the assertions or analyses of various claims and narratives specifying Jews and Israelis as exceptionally creative: the aforementioned elitism-paranoia nexus. At least from an historical perspective the two socio-cultural categories of Jews and Israelis are both different and discontinuousyet connected. This review serves as a historical recapitulation of the events and achievements that have accompanied such constructs, especially in relation to Israel which is emphasized due to its slightly heightened relevance to the focus of this dissertation. This thematic content is important not only as part of the introductory review that presents the interconnectedness of creativity and national sentiments in contemporary Jewish-Israeli culture, but also because it encompasses many of the issues that informants referred to in the ethnographic chapters. For purposes of chronological clarity, I begin with a review of the connection between Jewishness and creativity and then continue with the connection between Israeliness and creativity, addressing the process of how the former merges into the latter while the latter attempts to separate itself orselectively handpick various constituents from the former. The elitism-paranoia nexus is fashioned from this process. To the extent that creativity and intelligence overlap3 in at least one of the two central concentrations of Jewish communities in the world, the United States (the other being Israel), there is a long-standing tradition of group-held (both in-groups and out- groups) beliefs of being highly intelligent and driven and therefore elitist toward other ethnic and religious groups.4 These beliefs are manifested in the collective or socially distinctive (between Jews, that is) cultural cherishing of intellectual, academic, and creative achievements, evident primarily in white-collar ambitions alongside the intellectual capital embedded in the accumulation of (and contribution to) academic prestige and elevated cultural knowledge5 (Cohen & Eisen, 2000; Gilman, 1996;
3There is some disagreement between researchers as to whether the concepts of intelligence and creativity are synonymous, partially overlap, or refer to a completely different set of abilities (Sternberg &O'Hara, 1999). I tend to agree with the majority of researchers, who lean toward the middle ground of this discussion, and contend that creativity and intelligence are most probably somewhat connected and fuel each other. 4Popular American writer Amy Chua, in her book The Triple Package (2014) co-authored with Jay Rubenfeld, drew parallels between Jews, Mormons, and the Igbo people, claiming that all possess a "superiority complex," a deeply internalized belief of the cultural group's exceptionality or superiority. 5These preferences, especially as they relate to careers, are most famously embodied in the cultural stereotype of the domineering, destructive Jewish mother and her exaggerated expectationsof her children's professional status.
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Hollinger, 2004; Markowitz, 1993; Staub, 2006; Steinberg, 2001; Tenenbaum &Davidman, 2007). Such cultural values need not, however, be relegated solely to the United States for two reasons: first, because these studies emphasized them as characteristics of the ethnos in some of the Jews' countries of origin, prior to their immigration to America; and second, because these conceptions and constructs pervade the American popular media (Konner, 2003; Gilman, 1996, 1998) whose messages, when delivered outside of the United States, both in Israel and worldwide,are more than likely to resonate with local, and perhaps slightly more latent, self-perceptions of intelligence and creativity as traits positively associated with Jewishness. The review of the link between Jewishness, intelligence, and creativity demands the careful considerationof two academically taboo issues. One relates to theological notions of divine chosenness, which refers to the covenant between the people of Israel and God but loses validity as a somewhat arrogant self-perception in light of attempts to formulate more pluralist and enlightened forms of Judaism in the postmodern age (Golding, 1999; Kornberg-Greenberg, 1999). The other refers to racially-inspired essentialism. Following Hernstein and Murray's (1994) controversial book,The Bell Curve, which argued in favor of a link between ethnicity and cognitive ability, Cochran,Hardy, and Harpending (2006) found that Jews of Ashkenazi descent scored higher in IQ tests than other European groups. Although this result was attributed to the natural selection powered by socio-historical conditions and endogamy, both this stance and the notion of chosenness have remained understandably unpopular in academic and, to a certain extent, religious and popular circles.6 Instead, I focus on two far more acknowledged interconnected topics in this respect: one relating to the endogenous cultural value of learning and the other to exogenous factors, namely,Jewish persecution throughout history. In this sense, elitism has either been rightfully earned through a culture of valuing scholarship or has evolved in a context of historical paranoia contributing to survival. I first address the elitism-paranoia nexus with the culturally valued practice of learning. Education of Jewish malesin the study and mastery of text has been noted as a fundamental component and ideal of traditional Judaism, dating from at least the rabbinic period,not as an instrument preparing boys for life but synonymous with life itself (Drazin, 1979). This practice has led to the assertion, notably by American sociologists Glazer (1965) and Sklare (1971),that the high rate of literacy among Jews due to religious adherence contributed significantly to their rapid ascent in the American labor market. It has been similarly implied that religious studies favored Jews academically when substituted for successful scholarships in secularAmerican universities (Greene, 2011). In this regard, Botticini and Eckstein (2012) offered an
6 Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, founder of the Reconstructionist movement,argued in favor of dropping the claim to chosenness viewing it as fertile ground for the development of racist ideologies and as the antithesis of modern thought (Kornberg-Greenberg, 1999).
14 analysis of the history of the Jewish people between 70 and 1492 using an economic lens which referred to the high literacy of Jews in a more elaborate fashion. They contended that in the aftermath of the destruction of the Second Temple, the Jewish religion shifted from rituals of sacrifice to the requirement that every Jewish man studied the Torah and sent his sons to school or the synagogue to learn how to do so. This new norm led to a significant process of conversion fromJudaism for rural Jews who lacked the economic means to meet the new requirement and to the spread of literacy among the increasingly urbanized Jews under the Muslim caliphates and in the Christian worlds where they sought employment opportunities. Having become a small population of literate peoplein a largely illiterate world, the notion of being Jewish became interchangeable with the urban occupations for which they become famously (and infamously) known. The somewhat unique nature of Jewish education and study deserves to be mentioned, as the mastery of texts is not achieved solely through rote repetition but also through an engagement with active learning, probing, and questioning. In his popular book, To Know That We Do Not Know, Hareven (2004) identified in Judaism a "monotheistic tension" which originated in the shift from polytheism to monotheism. This tension stems from the believer's inner knowledge of God's indisputable existence and the duty to direct his mind toward God, which contradicts the prohibition oncreating a representation, heretical pagan, or anthropogenic construction of that same divinity as an essentially unknowable entity.7Hareven contended that this tension leads Judaism to a tradition of exegesis of textual interpretations which are multiple, sincea definitive answer to God's nature is not provided. This "lack of knowledge" leaves space for questioning and challenging, irrespective of whether it results in an increased knowledge of God, and even translates into secular scholarly activities. As Hareven wrote: Even though Judaism did not enquire much about the essence of idolatry, for two thousand years it had a de facto element of denial of idolatry (referring to the Midrash). The essence or message of the Midrash is that there is no enslavement to some known text that is already written. We don't only memorize it, rather, we examine it, we ask questions, and we reinterpret it. This is in fact the culture of knowledge that Jews have passed down from generation to generation.There is permission to test any saying no matter how sacred and to seek its exegesis without idolizing it. We can assume that this tradition of Midrash that renews itself from generation to generation may have been that which endowed many Jews with their accomplishments in science; that is, it gave them the willingness to reexamine existing formulas without becoming enslaved to them and to offer
7Hareven referred to the unknowable essence of God through the instances in the Bible in which God declared itself as such;the God who, when asked his name by Moses replied, "I am that I am" (Exodus 3:14), forbade the fashioning of his likeness (Exodus, 20:1-17),later declared to Moses "Thou canst not see my face" (Exodus 33:20), and revealed his presence to Elijah as "a still small voice" (1 Kings 19:12).
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new ones that would have to be tested as well. It is true that Einstein never studied in a beit-midrash, but his greatest accomplishment was not idolizing Newton's physics and daring to propose a more comprehensive formula –one that would be submitted to the test of future generations.8 We can also ask why the proportion of Jews who have won Nobel Prizes is larger than their proportion in the world's population: is this due to their mind,or is this a result of growing up in a culture that opposes human certainty and encourages constant questioning and reinterpretation.9 (Hareven, 2004,p.55) The second well-acknowledged topic which refers to Jewish creativity is Jewish persecution. This is an issue of particular importance, as it stands as a cultural precursor to the aforementioned Jewish-Israeli elitism-paranoia nexus and merges into contemporary Israeli national identity (discussed below). The Jewish literary polysystem is fraught with narratives of creativity as an answer to or result of paranoia, which, in such cases, is closely akin to weakness. The archetype of these narratives can be located in the biblical story of David and Goliath as a central cultural symbol, according to which the resourcefulness of the former enabled him to defeat the latter despite the odds. Although this may be the most ancient of these narratives, it is far from the only one. The predilection to emphasize the literary parallels between various Hebrew canonical texts and other Jewish sources –namely, popular literary traditions created by Jews in the Diaspora which produced a common Jewish genealogy from ethnically diverse narratives –is accredited to the work of Dov Noy. In Diaspora folktales especially, there is specific attention to tales of survival, which reflect Jewish lives in exile and in the Diaspora, and the ecotypification of tales –the cultural assimilation of intercultural tale types such that the roles of the weak and the strong across cultures are recast respectively as (a poor but resourceful) Jew and (an evil king or powerful landlord) Gentile,with the former outsmarting the latter (Hasan-Rokem, 2004; Yassif, 1999). Jewish elitism is reflected in Jewish survival. The same goes for the creativity embedded in Jewish humor (often at the Gentiles' expense), which has been noted as a form of secular communal ritual that both binds and characterizes the community and acts adaptively for its survival (Schlesinger, 1979). Freud (1905/2002) famously expressed a similar belief that Jewish jokes and the creativity embedded in Jewish humorare a sublimative reflection on the undeserving misery of many Jewish communities. The creative ingenuity and cunning in these folkloristic self-perceptions is an attempt to establish Jewish resistance in spite of the inherent paranoia when facing persecution or other externally-imposed hardships deriving from their outsider status. It
8With regards to Einstein in particular, Gimbel (2012) pointed out a possible link between the general Jewish intellectual heritage of giving numerous interpretations to texts and the fundamental tenet of the theory of relativity,that is, relativity itself as opposed to absoluteness. Thus, ironically, one could argue that there is a sort of "Jewish science" (as the Nazis claimed) in the sense that the spirit of Jewish thought informed Einstein's major contribution to science. 9My translation from the original Hebrew.
16 denotes creativity-as-process (as opposed to the capitalistic creativity-as-product) and corresponds theoretically with Scott's (1990) "weapons of the weak" and "everyday resistance" or De Certeau's (1984) "ways of operating": intelligence, cunningness, pretense, avoidance, simulation of compliance, active and passive sabotage, survival, and the ability to "makedo." A prime example of a similar ethno-national personality trait in this regard is Detienne and Vernant's (1978) discussion of the Greek quality of metis which Reed-Danahay (1993) quoted as an accurate description of the broader meanings of cunningness:
It combines flair, wisdom, forethought, subtletyof mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, various skills and experience acquired over the years. It is applied in situations which are transient, shifting, disconcerting and ambiguous, situations which do not lead themselves to precise measurement, exact calculation or rigorous logic. (p. 222)10 The Jewish outsider status has been picked up by several theoreticians as having contributed positively to their intelligence and creativity. Most notably,paranoia-infused weakness, here present in the form of Gentile persecution, stimulated the imagination of several non-Jewish sociologists. Veblen (1919/1998) argued that the cultural marginality/liminality of the diasporic/hyphenated Jew through divided cultural allegiance contributed to a skeptical frame of mind toward accepted knowledge, which thus stimulated intellectual creativity in scientific work. Sombart (1911/2001) saw the Jewish spirit as an agent of capitalism,created as a replacement for the old guild system from which they had been restricted. Patai (1976/1996) attributed the emergence of Jewish intellectual superiority(in a book-length conservative argument advocating its existence) to Gentile persecution, mind-sharpening religious learning, commercial occupations, and urban living. Similarly, Hollinger (2004) suggestedthat the prohibition on owning, the restrictions on professions, and their outsider status led the Jews to develop a unique set of skills which matched those needed to succeed in the modern and urbanized American socioeconomic context. In The Jewish Century, Slezkine (2004) followed a similar train of thought in his distinction between "Apollonian" people, natives of a given geographical space, and "Mercurian" people, nomads who offer their services for tasks that the natives are unable
10Reed-Danahay cited other works which mention practices across cultures similar to the quality of metis: the French concept of "la perruque," which refers to disguising one's personal work as the work of one's employer and "débrouillardise"among residents of the Lavialle region; "la furbizia" (cunning) among the underclass in Naples; "poniria" among Cretan shepherds, which refers to a disrespectful attitude toward those in power; "the Kentucky way" in the Appalachian region, which refers to overcoming hardships; and the concept of "making out" among Hispanic adolescents in rural Texas which refers to fiddling academic tasks. Relevant to this issue and echoing the cunning and débrouillardise, I find it important to refer to two warnings mentioned in Liep (2001): first, Parkin (2001) warned of the temptation to refer to acts of violence and states of poverty as creativity;and second, Fernandez (2001) cautioned anthropologists against being creative in lieu of their informants.
17 or unwilling to perform. Mercurians are named after Mercury, the wandering god, patron of those living by their wit, craft, and art.Of all Mercurian people (Armenians, Parsis, Gypsies, and others), Slezkine asserted that Jews were the most accomplished, because they had been practicing service nomadism for a long time over a large territory and were consistently approached with a blend of fear, contempt, and admiration from the Apollonian locals in Europe. His "Jewish century" did not, therefore, refer to a century punctuated by Jewish success but rather to the fact that in an entrepreneurial modern age, in order to succeed, Apollonians would have to increasingly resemble Jews and become Mercurian, in others words, to be urban, mobile, literate, mentally nimble, and professionally flexible – the very description of a present-day creative entrepreneur. From adifferentyet related angle, Sartre (1944/1970) argued that Jewish intellectual achievements were the result of unsuccessful attempts at assimilation. According to Sartre, Jews feared the irrationality of the national sentiments of the host culture (epitomized in the Nazi semi-mystical nationalist inclination) which could erupt in violence toward themand their "otherness". Therefore, Jews used scientific contributions by their elite to try and convince Gentiles of the shared traits of all humanity:all people are subject to the same economic laws (Marx) and physical laws (Einstein) and share the same psyche (Freud). Unfortunately, their overzealousness to prove their position led Jews to excel in their intellectual contributions which, paradoxically, resulted in proving for the very thing they had been advocating against, namely, their exceptionality. The anti-Semitic sentiments that fuel Jews' paranoid fears and partial rejection from their host society deserve special mention. First,as I have shown, they lie at the core of the acrimony in which Jewish intelligence and creativity are said to have evolved;they may therefore be considered "positive" to a certain extent. Second, anti- Semitism is important becauseof the creativity and intelligence ascribed to Jews as a direct process of this negative racial assignation that exerts a form of symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 2000) on them. In Europe, countless important personalities and cultural movements have construed Jews as Europe's dishonest, mean, crafty, and repugnant internal other (Ballard, 1996; Gilman, 1986, 1996) and their otherness as diabolical and harmful. Examples include Kant, who distinguished between the rational and the crafty man and saw Jews as a nation of deceivers for their own economic advantage, and Wagner, who saw immorality as a marker of the Jewish character. Jewish intelligence was perceived as a vice in Shakespearian writings, the culture of "professor's novels" in nineteenth-century Germany saw the scientist's brilliance as a mark of social deviance, and the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion associated Jews with world domination. Gilman (1986) implied that this very ascription and possible acceptance and internalization of Gentile anxiety might have contributed to the Jews' own self- perception of intelligence. Third, anti-Semitism embodied many of the images of the
18 miserable Jew from which Zionism tried (not always successfully) to detach itself in its process of creative renaissance and in the establishment of the Israeli nation-state as a creative superpower.This discussion on the role of anti-Semitism leads to a question about the influences of this imperfect political palingenesis on creativity as it is now. The link between Israeliness and creativity can be examined in a twofold manner: first, by addressing the very invention of modern Israeli culture as a creative endeavor; and second, by focusing on the attribution of characteristics that relate to creativity and creative endeavors to that newly constructed Israeliness. Regarding the former, the invention of Israeliness, since the new Israeli tradition attempted, for the most part, to break with the Jewish past, I rely on the concept of collective memory as a theoretical reference for this construct. Collective memory refers to aspects of tradition and culture of the past that constitute a resource that can be manipulated and exploited according to the needs and interests of the present in creating this collective memory, and the concomitant commemorative rituals that ostensibly inform national identity (Weingrod, 1997). For example, according to Zerubavel (1995),to the extent that Zionist thought divided Jewish history into antiquity, exile, and return, the new settlers largely downplayed the pusillanimous historical middle section and cast themselves and their children as the descendants of the heroes of allegedly relevant ancient myths such asMasada11 and the Bar-Kokhba Revolt. These events came to enjoy an unproblematic historical continuity with another myth of bravery from just before the creation of the state,the battle of TelHai,at the expense of a disregarded recent and grim Jewish past. Jewish victimization was indeed the disease for which Zionism presented itself as the cure. Zionism evoked creativity by advocating the reformation of the wretched, fearful, and weak Jew and by relying on the younger generations. By exchanging what was perceived as impotence and heteronomy for determination, strength, and self- defense, the Zionist movement carried a message of identity change (Almog, 1997; Laqueur, 1976; Yair, 2011). This message was epitomized in Nordau's concept of the Muskeljuden – the new and manly Jew (Mosse, 1992; Presner, 2003) – and the Arabic influence on the Sabra/New Jew patterns of speech, which resulted in "dugri speech" and, especially, in what Katriel (2004) called its "rhetoric of agency": "a male and militaristic…idiom of defiance associated with concepts of inner strength and an activist orientation" (p.155). This primal stance, while not particularly elitist (at the time), displayed a clear disdain for weakness or paranoia and a glorification of strength. Zionist leaders relied on the young generation's youthful exuberance and ability to break awayfrom societal norms, and the early Zionist pioneering spirit involved an adolescent mode of aggression and revolt against the parental generation – their norms, traditions, and way of life. The new Yishuv aspired to renaissance, rejected the norms of the way
11It has been argued that the presently known story of Masada in particular is a mythical fabrication, a myth at odds with historical factual truth (see Ben-Yehuda, 1995).
19 of life inherited from exile, and, for the same reason,sawthe old Yishuv as another form of ghetto (Attias & Benbassa, 2003). Zionists also fought against Yiddish and, later, the Arabic spoken by Jewish immigrants from Arab countries, a language identified with the enemy,in order to establish the unquestioned primacy of Hebrew (whose resurrection was a monumental intellectual creative achievement) as the language of national rebirth (Hasan-Rokem, 2004). In concordance with the Zionist vision of returning to the land, either acquired or conquered, and "making the desert bloom," which in itself conveys the poetic quality of an ever-open possibility of starting again, the strong renewed Hebrew man –the glorified pioneer –renewed his ties with mother earth. This was first achieved by planting trees,a veritable rite, indispensable for entering into contact with the land (Attias & Benbassa, 2003;Pintel-Ginsberg, 2006),12 especially in the context of aridity, where creativity alone can be credited and an anthropocentric conquest of infertility implied. It is therefore highly symbolic that the Israeli drip irrigation system destined to cope with scarcity of water (pioneered in 1959) has been described as one of the great recent agricultural revolutions and was awarded a prize for inventions of the half century in 1998. A second practice of renewing thebond with the land was manifested in the blend of conquering and farming it in the kibbutz,a unique and innovative concept of collective farming and communal living which was part of a colonial strategy aimed at seizing the land,13 aided and defended by quasi-military units, while being presented as part of the renewal of the Hebrew Sabra – the plant growing out of ungrateful and rebellious soil (Attias & Benbassa, 2003). In sum, the renewed Hebrew man, the reconquered land, and the resurrected Hebrew language lay at the heart of the Zionist credo of a national renaissance, all serving to denote creative strength,in contrast to the physically weak, socially paranoid, intellectual, and cunning Diaspora Jew. This patently "masculine" ethos pervaded the Zionist narrative and the ensuing militaristic masculinity of Israeli nationalism (Ben- Eliezer, 1998; Ben-Ari &Lomsky-Feder,1999; Kaplan, 2007). This character bears a cultural affinity to the achievements for which Israel is construed as a superpower,as those too appear to be almost entirely male in gender. Their maleness derives from their primary reference to technological achievements and "hard," instrumental domains – high-tech and low-tech (military and civilian high-tech, information, medicine, and agriculture), the quantity of registered patents, research ("proven" through numerous academic publications), and demonstrations of military and paramilitary might. It is
12 While Attias and Benbassa (2003) mentioned this practice more generally, Pintel-Ginsberg (2006) referred specifically to the adoption of TuB'Shvat,amarginal calendar event of the Jewish year,by the secular Zionist movement as the"festival of trees" marked by a new nationwide ritual: planting young trees on barren land in order to return the land to its former biblical abundance. 13It has been argued that the socialist component of the kibbutz ideology was merely the retrospective legitimation of this strategy (see Shafir, 1989), although this does not prevent contemporary Israelis from proudly presenting the kibbutz as the only historical instance in which socialism was practiced with any success.
20 precisely through the interest in technology that this renaissance hinted at what would later become the fully-fledged claim to elitism of the "start-up nation." Present-day Jewish-Israeli national culture is by no means a unilineal trajectory from weakness to strength. Schwartz (1991) argued that collective memory both depends on and breaks away from history. While I have shown how it broke from history by emphasizing strength,the missing side of this cultural coin relates to the issue of Israeli existential paranoia due to its self-perceived geopolitical inferiority which, in this sense, refers to Jewish weakness albeit from a more robust and secure position – a position which will eventually overcomes the great challenges to its existence and survival. Gretz (1995) wrote that one of Israel's founding myths, one of the main stories that formed Zionist culture throughout the years, is the story of the "few against the many." Especially prevalent in Jewish literature of the nineteenth century, this myth is based primarily on biblical stories of reconquering and defending the land (including the aforementioned legends of David and Goliath, Masada, and the Bar-Kokhba Revolt) with the religious belief reinterpreted as secular. This myth is represented at all levels of Israeli popular culture and political rhetoric until today. For example, in a book aptly entitled The Few Against the Many, Tal (1996) argued that this idiom is a guiding principle in Israel's doctrine about its national security. Bar-Tal and Antebi (1992) offered a similar term, "siege mentality", to point out that the Israeli ethos has been substantially affected by the long history of Jewish persecution.This mentality posits the group as alone and threatened and its solidarity and able self-defense as paramount because outside help cannot be counted on. Within conservative political agendas past Jewish persecutionseeps into and saturates the Israeli mythos;anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, wars waged against the State of Israel, trade embargos, terrorist attacks, international condemnations of Israel, and various forms of criticism are all perceived as belonging to the same evidential category of the world's negative intentions. The Holocaust, in particular, is immensely influential as historical evidence of Jewish vulnerability, relating to Israel's inferior conditions.Its institutionalization, politicization, and status as some form of civil religion in Israel have all been noted (Feldman, 2008; Wistrich, 1997). The enlistment of its lurking shadow in the service of chauvinistic nationalist agendas is an ever-present (and often used) option on the Israeli political scene. This corresponds with Shalit's (1994) observation that Israeli politics are psychologically driven by a "fear of annihilation" whose denial and illusion of strength are signs of its underlying existence. These idioms –"the few against the many,""siege mentality," and "fear of annihilation"– are closely related to a consensual militaristic ethos. According to Kimmerling (2001), this ethos is one of the two deep metacultural codes (the other is Jewishness –a mix of secular nationalism and popular religious adherence) that can be applied to most Jewish citizens of the state and transcends the cultural fragmentations
21 and crises that Zionism has recently undergone. These idioms, as they relate to this ethos and the ongoing ethno-national conflict,were essential to the creation of the high-tech sector for which Israel has come to be known as global creative superpower characterized by an ethos of entrepreneurialism within a neoliberal logic. There is no doubt that Israel's geopolitical inferiority fuels fears over its regional vulnerability and is widely understood within a "quantity versus quality" paradigm.14 Israel has sought to redress the imbalance of this asymmetry, which is congruent with a modernistic approach to creativity that favors scientific knowledge, by accentuating the importance of technological advantage (Ben-Israel, 2006) which, from a weaponry perspective, enables Israel's military superiority to be maintained as a prime characteristic of its strategic thinking (Inbar, 1998). Consequently, Israel's creative high- tech realm has benefited from heavy state support as well as US grants and loans, since it was once symbiotic and is today substantially connected to the military-industrial complex (Rivlin, 2011). This connection is especially evident in the elite intelligence units, namely 8200.15A large number of 8200 alumni have formed successful high-tech ventures based on their technological trainingand projects within the unit. This military- industrial complex was created in order to overcome the gap created by a "siege mentality" event:the imposition of a French embargo on military supplies in June 1967 (Shafir & Peled, 2002). This was a highly significant eventin which the notion of local inventiveness as the proud offspring of (Gentile-imposed) necessity – the harnessing of Jewish-Israeli capabilities as an answer to powerlessness – came to full fruition. The army, using newer and more sophisticated equipment, became the engine of growth and the focus of knowledge dissemination for advanced high-techindustries, providing training, experience, and international marketing prestige and constituted the main clientele of the newborn industry (Baruch, 2008; Shafir &Peled, 2002). In this military- technological edge, elitism (in the form of technological achievements but not necessarily, at least on the surface, cultural essentialism) marks its presence as an agent of strength, countering both paranoia and weakness. Alongside and similarly relevant to these two historical and cultural impetuses are several other issues linking creativity and entrepreneurial high-tech to the Israeli army. Some refer to creativity-as-products, others to creativity-as-process. The first of these is the flow of knowledge from the military to the civilian sector in cases when the former experiences economic recession or project cancellations;16for example, in 1987,
14 Shimon Peres, probably one of the nation's staunchest supporters and principal facilitators of the high-tech industry, wrote about Israel's early days: "Even I claimed during those days that the State of Israel's only chance of existing was through its 'scientification,' which had the potential to render obsolete the values of classical strategy, built on the foundations of time, territory, and the advantages of being outnumbered " (Ben-Israel, 1996, p. 36). 15Unit 8200 is the largest unit in the IDF, responsible for collecting signal intelligence. In the public sphere, semi- revealing journalistic sources have associated the unit with Israel's high-tech rise or with various largely undisclosed contributions to Israel's security, for example,therecent alleged (co-)creation of the Stuxnet computer worm in 2010 as part of the attempts to disrupt Iran's nuclear program (see Halliday, 2010; Kellman, 2013). 16 This happened on a large scale in the United States when, in 1975, at the end of the Vietnam War, US defense spending started to decline and the aircraft industry went into recession. Engineers and others turned to the civilian sector and were among the founders of the Silicon Valley high-tech sector.
22 following the cancellation of the Lavi fighter project, many former employees founded new enterprises, initiating one of the main bases of Israel's civilian high-tech sector (Rivlin, 2011).The second is of a more cultural character.In addition to technological expertise, the army is credited with instilling in young Israelis perseverance, tenacity, and the development of skills of improvisation (and perhaps even some existential urgency), which Israeli high-tech entrepreneurs in civilian andprivate industries often acknowledge as having contributed to their success (Lerner & Avrahami, 2003; Pines,Dvir, & Sadeh, 2004; Senor & Singer, 2009). Senor and Singer (2009) extended this somewhat irreverent gungho attitude beyond the boundaries of the army to explain the success of Israeli high-tech, which can be thought of asa Benedictian cultural configuration (see Benedict, 1935/2005) that revolves around a flexible culture of informality and constant questioning of authority. By doing so, they reiterated the aforementioned Sabra's "rhetoric of agency" as well as the argumentative tradition that characterizes Jewish learning. This view is also evident intwo of cultural sociologist Yair's (2011) "ten commandments" of the code of contemporary Israeliness: "never respect authority" and "always have an opinion." Yair identified another "commandment" associated directly with creativity – "improvise and be creative" – to which he attributed the unusual concentration of creative technologies in Israel. However, he associated it with a sense of impending doom;survival is more likely to be achieved through improvisation and an openness to change. The third issue linking creativity and entrepreneurial high-tech to the Israeli armyis a category in itself and refers to the broad issue of unorthodox military warfare. In a post-hegemonic and post-heroic society, the Israeli army is subjected to increasing scrutiny and criticism from civilian society withregards to casualties (Cohen, 2003). This is a driving force in the development of relevant unusual tactics to ensure the protection of Israeli soldiers in the context of Israel's ongoing colonial practices and policing of the Palestinian territories. Famous examples include the "walking through walls" tactic (Weizman, 2006)17 and the development of war technologies such as various remote- controlled devices and unmanned vehicles, a field which enjoys considerable investment and harbors the highest hopes regarding Israel's future wars (Orpaz, 2014).This same technology has been used inversely in Israel's recurring conflicts with Hamas in recent years; precautions are taken, using various technological means, to increase precision in the use of lethal force and to lessen collateral damage in order to avoid diplomatic countermeasures or to promote this kind of warfare as more "ethical"(Gordon, 2009).18 From another angle of unorthodox military warfare, various well-known Israel Defense Forces (IDF) military operations have earned their place in
17 During the 2002 Operation Defensive Shield, the IDF opted not to advance in the streets but to walk through Palestinian homes by exploding the walls of adjacent houses. 18The moral dangers of unmanned war machines have been most recently addressed in Rahim's (2015) report to Amnesty International, stating that their use would not comply with human rights law.
23 popular militaristic lore through amusingstories that blur the distinction between war and play.19Though essentially anecdotal, these kinds of stories are part of the Israeli army's more general ethos of resourcefulness and unconventionaltactics, epitomized in the concept of a "small and clever IDF" championed by Chief of Staff Dan Shomron (1987–1991) and his successor Ehud Barak (1991–1995). This concept, referring to efficiency, specialization, and professionalism and a move away from the quasi- amateur attributes of a traditional people's army (Cohen, 1997), also served (and still serves) as a metaphor for shrewdness and agility (Gilman, 1996).Through the metaphorical realm, this concept of a small and highly capable elite implies that the army's diminutive size, usually acharacteristic of weakness,can in fact bea desirable and positive feature of creative strength. The ideal of being small, resourceful, and unorthodox inevitably invokes espionage. An anonymous article entitled "Spymasters Who Created a Nation," published in The Times in 1986 began with the biblical story of the spies sent by Moses into the land of Canaan and continued: In the beginning of that state too were the spies. In a sense, Israel is an undercover creation, peopled by illegal immigrants smuggled out of many countries into a land that had to be conquered and held by an underground army, armed with weapons bought and brought in secret. The spies had to be in at the beginning, and without them there could have been no country (p.194). Clandestine operations and their resourceful shrewdness have since been crystallized, mythologized, and integrated in the collective Israeli memory in the allegorical figure of the highly creative and capable Israeli spy,20 a spy who was involved in defining moments of the nation, such as, most notably, the capture of Adolf Eichmann. This entails the last facet of unorthodox military warfare, which relates to Israel's mythologized secret might employedthrough the enlistment of cunning and artfulness in the service of nationalism,21 that is, to the extent to which spectacular failures are downplayed and the focus shifts to what Black and Morris (1991) called "world-class coups." A satisfactory review of Israeli competence in espionage is
19In his book dedicated to the actions of Sayeret Matkal, one of Israel's elite combat units, Zunder (2000), a journalist, wrote: "the many courses of action of Sayeret Matkal combat fighters are very diverse and include a pattern of deception, as is evident in some of the unit's actions. In the Sabena hijack rescue the combat fighters were dressed as technicians in white overalls, in operation Aviv Neurim they were dressed as lovers, and in the raid on Entebbe the deception including impersonating Idi Amin's escort. One of the veterans of the unit described its operations using the word 'theater' " (p.23). 20 During 2015 and 2016 two major events relating to the Israeli secret service were widely reported in the media. The first, in December 2015, was the appointment of Yossi Cohen as the new director of the Mossad. During his inaugural speech, Cohen asserted that during his tenure, audacity and creativity would be the two guiding principles of the Mossad's activity through which Israel's ongoing security would be ensured (Blumenthal & Ben-Yishai, 2015). The second, in March 2016, was the death of legendary Mossad director Meir Dagan (who served between 2002 and 2011). In the eulogies delivered at his funeral, the themes of creativity and artfulness were mentioned as his legacy within the organization (Raavad, 2016).
21Good examples ofthis can be found in the Mossad's former motto, "For by wise guidance [also deception] you shall wage your war" (Proverbs 24:6), and current one, "Where there is no guidance [deception] a nation falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety" (Proverbs 11:14).
24 undermined by alack of literature, as with other topics concerning national security such as the Israeli nuclear program (see Kimmerling, 2003), due to the inaccessibility ofthe subject matter. The vast majority of relatively well-informed publications about Israel's secret agencies, intended ostensibly to satisfy public curiosity, thus belong to the journalistic sphere, alongside (ill)-informed, very accessible and widespread representations in pulpy novels and potboiler Hollywood and local entertainment. These offer cultural indicators that in present-day Israel, the allegorical figure of the spy –an essentially suspicious (if not paranoid) undercover persona who scouts out the territory for his group, interposes himself in others' lands, and lives through deception – still carries, from its status as a metonymy for Israeliness and its immense popularity during its glorified heyday,22a powerful aura of relevance with regards to the link between creativity (both as process and as products) and warfare. Moreover, it is important to note that Israel's espionage achievements resonate surprisingly well with traditional stereotypes of the Jew (which seep into Jewish and Israeli subconscious and conscious self-image) and, in particular, with the literature of Jewish-conspiracy theories such as the notorious Protocolsof the Elders of Zion. Laqueur (2008) claimed that the reputation of the Jew as a swindler who is inherently devious, never straightforward, andstrives for secretworld domination is echoed in contemporary anti-Semitism (which, for example, attributes 9/11 to the Mossad). The miserable and despised Jew turns into a superhuman, demonic, almost omnipotent figure, a danger to the whole world and the instigator of a new world war. Paradoxically, in his paranoia and underground way of life, he is, indeed, strong. Both Israel's geopolitical fears and the sense of cultural renewal contribute to the development of the Israeli high-tech sector, which, as previously mentioned, is of great relevance to this research.The Israeli high-tech civilian sector stands today as an outstandingly prolific and innovative world concentration of creative economyand one of the few Silicon Valley types of technology centers, nicknamed "Silicon Wadi." Alongside the invaluable contribution of the military and the military-industrial complex from which it has evolved, the rise of the Israeli high-tech sector is also indebted to two influential trends:significant government support and subsidization for industrial (civilian) research and development (R&D) and the immensely influential globalization process since the 1990s. Active government policy for the industrial civilian sector (alongside abundant resources allocated to defense and agriculture) dates back to 1968. It was recognized early on that Israel's comparative advantage resides in high-skilled labor and world-class academic resources to compensate for its poor natural resources and geopolitical disadvantages and to make Israeli companies more attractive to foreign investors
22For my bar mitzvah (in 1989), which coincided with my return to Israel from France where I had grown up, I was given a book about Israeli spies by some relatives. I recall that it made perfect sense to me as a gift welcoming me back to Israel and into my Israeli adulthood.
25
(Trajtenberg, 2001). Since then,active support has come predominantly in the form of grants and programs, taken from the budgetary resources of the Office of the Chief Scientist (OCS) in the Ministry of Industry and Trade. Two such programs deserve special mention. The first is the Binational Industrial Research and Development Foundation (the BIRD program), initiated in 1977 as a joint US-Israel venture to stimulate, support, and promote R&D in the field of non-defense high-tech industries in the private sector for the benefit of both countries.23 The second program is MAGNET, established in 1994 to encourage pre-competitive research and including technological incubators24 and multilateral international R&D collaboration.25As a result of this program Israel enjoys free trade agreements with the United States and the European Union, and joint ventures between Israeli and foreign companies in the United States are entitled to aid from both governments. In the early 1990s, the technological incubators targeted new immigrants from the Former Soviet Union, many of whom were scientists and skilled professionals but who lackedknowledge of Hebrew and English and of Western commercial and managerial practices (Trajtenberg, 2001). To the extent that patents are indicators of innovative activity, Israel saw two major leaps in this field. The first occurred between 1983 and 1987 and was due to the 1985 economic stabilization program which marked the early beginnings of neoliberalism in Israel. During that time, Israeli manufacturing moved away from traditional industries and moved into technologically advanced export-oriented sectors. The second leap occurred between 1991 and 1995,a period that saw the true rise of the Israeli high-tech industry due to immigration, globalization, and major sociocultural and political changes. Indeed, according to Levy (2010), the 1990s saw the emergence of the ethos of the market economy characterized by a liberal discourse on the Israeli scene. The globalization that followed the 1993 Oslo peace accords and the influx of immigrants from the Former Soviet Union was accompanied by structural changes in the economy according to the neoliberal doctrine. This doctrine enhanced the capacity of the market to become exposed to investments and bilateral commercial exchanges. It was during this time that international technology companies established R&D facilities in Israel. Globalization was also accompanied by a new political discourse which it nurtured. The new discourse saw the decline of collectivism and pioneering which Shafir and Peled (2002) argued were the primary symbols of the republican discourse that had crystallized the political Jewish-Israeli community until then. Instead, a neoliberal agenda appeared among the secular Ashkenazi upper-middle class and the "Westernized" Mizrahim, which accentuated new values such as individualism, privatization, competitiveness, efficiency, and a culture of consumerism, endowing the
23For more information, see the BIRD program site: http://www.birdf.com/?CategoryID=311 24Technological incubators are support organizations that give fledgling entrepreneurs an opportunity to develop their innovative technological ideas and set up new businesses in order to commercialize them. 25For more information, see the MAGNET program site: http://www.magnet.org.il/
26
"deserving few" with an aura of elitism. The characteristics of this neoliberal agenda heralded the spread of high-tech, which is part of a postmodern culture of consumerism, engendered by a universalistic (as opposed to tribal) assimilation of a global culture in Israel, aptly termed "McWorld" (Ram,1997). High-tech clusters are located in Israel's big cities, namely TelAviv (Israel's McWorld capital) and its metropolitan area. TelAviv's young and cosmopolitan spirit and tolerant political climate suits high-tech and creative endeavors of all sorts, allowing entrepreneurial creativity to thrive. Since the overwhelming majority of high-tech firms in Israel emerge fromstart- ups established by single entrepreneurs, the local high-tech sector comprises a very large number of small and medium firms.The vitality,the daring, and some spectacular successes of this sector owe in no small measure to this feature that provides favorable conditions for an accelerated Darwinian process (Trajtenberg, 2001). More specifically, this context was punctuated in 1998 by the success of Yossi Vardi and Mirabilis. After a career in the public and private sectors, Vardi joined forces with his son and three of his son's friends to co-found Mirabilis in 1996, an enterprise which was subsequently sold to America Online (AOL) in 1998 for the sum of 400 million dollars, making it a landmark Israeli success and example for aspiring Israeli entrepreneurs and triggering the local dot.com boom (David, 2012). Vardi became deeply involved in the promotion and development of Israeli high-tech and creative technologies and a prominent figure for many of the informants whoare the focus of the current research and the public events in which they participate. Thousands of start-ups have subsequently been established, and since the 2000s, Israel's growth has switched from being consumption-led to export- led with high-tech exports leading the way as a considerable source of income (Rivlin, 2011). Like the "Jewish genius a 100 years before, this state of affairs too has fired the imagination of various writers,and in this respect, Senor and Singer's Start-Up Nation (2009) does indeed burn bright. On a more critical note, the powerful process of state-building embedded in the production of new technologies, both in the sense of the revenues they generate and Israel's sociocultural status as a striking success story, also contains the seeds of what Markowitz,Sharot, and Shokeid (2015) referred to as "nation-unbuilding." Its first aspect relates to the army which, as mentioned earlier, provides much of the initial training and the social networks through which the recruiting in the high-tech sector takes place. Aside from accentuating men's advantage over women, this causes the structural exclusion of the segments of the populations that are exempt from military conscription,namely, ultra-orthodox Jews and the vast majority of Palestinian citizens of Israel. The second aspect involves the seemingly poorer educational system available in Israel's development towns (Kfir & Ariav, 2008) which are anyway more geographically distant from the globalized concentrations of the new economy. This second-rate education does not enable access to the skills required for the high-tech
27 sector either through the relevant army units or through Israel's universities, and reproduces de factothe unequal balance of power and boundary maintenance between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews. A boundary embodied in the ongoing perception of the "high-tech people" as the descendants of Israel's founding generation (Baruch, 2007). These facets of "nation-unbuilding" thus complicate any vision of Jewish-Israeli creativity in the high-tech sector as a unifying, egalitarian, and explicitly beneficial meltingpot.This topic is addressed in Chapter 5. Tosum up, I have provided a historiographical and academic review of the various relevant thematic constituents relating to Jewish and Israeli creativity: Jewish intellectual superiority, Jewish artfulness evolving from persecution, the Hebrew/Sabra renewal, Israeli militarism (in terms of both superior technology and an ethos of resourcefulness), Israel's self-perception of geopolitical inferiority, and the rise of the Israeli high-tech industry in the context of globalization. These are all encircled by a broader meta-theme that I have called the Jewish-Israeli elitism-paranoia nexus that also includes a weakness-strength axis. This term is instrumental in the analysis of the ethnographic data that relate to these constituents. I now turn to a presentation of the methods that guided me in the collection of the data presented in the ethnographic chapters of this dissertation.
Methodology Like all abstract ideas and social phenomena with multifaceted manifestations, there is no specific single-bounded geographic place in which Jewish-Israeli creativity may be entered and observed, because its presence pervades the Israeli public sphere and discourse. This is why I decided against focusing on a specific locale or site such as the army or the educational system; they are simplynot independent from oneanother in their references to creativity. My personal and serendipitous journey of fieldwork (as fieldwork is indeed a serendipitous endeavor [Rivoal &Salazar, 2013]) might best be described as multi-sited fieldwork (Marcus, 1995,1998). It entails four types of "following": "the thing" and "the people," according to Marcus, and"the idealization" and "the silence," two types I propose, inspired by Marcus' ideas. Fieldwork was conducted throughout Israel from 2010 to 2014 in a wide range of interconnected creativity-related events. The fieldwork was, of course, a personal process of delineating the contours of Jewish-Israeli creativity – personal in the sense that by "following," the ethnographer also co-produces space (Falzon, 2009). "How-to" guides to ethnography justifiably emphasize that during fieldwork the researcher is the actual instrument of research, a subject for consideration (see Bernard, 2006; Fetterman, 2010). This issue is important because while those journeys were profoundly personal, I maintained a strong analytical awareness, as a significant hallmark of anthropological inquiries, relating in this case to a critical (as opposed to reverential) stance toward creativity in terms of both
28 its own positiveness and my own creative construction of the field. This prevented the fieldwork trips from becoming ego-based and enabled them to provide a well-rounded overview of the subject. They were ethnographic, in the sense that the project of data gathering transcended the self. The fieldwork that produced the data for this dissertation focusedeventually on three principal categories of creative sectors: 1) the professional/public sector, which encompassed 18 professional and popular exhibitions of new technology;2) the youth sector, which comprised five private and public youth competitions and young inventors' classes, and two technology/entrepreneurship-themed camps forging the professional identities of future entrepreneurs; and 3) the high-tech sector, specifically a loosely-bounded group of people who often self-identify as the "geek community'" which is, in many respects, a sociocultural and technological elite. This latter group comprises primarily Jewish men – entrepreneurs, programmers, and designers, as well as some artists – who work for the most part in hi-tech,come on the whole from privileged backgrounds, are alumni of intelligence or other prestigious military units, and hold advanced academic degrees. They convene in various light-hearted and friendly networking and support-providing events entitled "unconferences," which are devoted to entrepreneurial creativity and often initiated and sponsored by the Israeli entrepreneur Yossi Vardi. My fieldwork included participant observation in 10 unconferences. These three sectors do not, of course, exhaust the field nor are they disconnected, as entrepreneurs both participate in various competitions and are present in exhibitions and youth, as part of the process of enculturation, are brought to unconferences and other similar events. I followed "the thing," "the people," and "the idealization" in these three sectors, and although the types of following did overlap (the same people are likely to be encountered while following a certain "thing," such as innovation in agriculture), they may be presented chronologically,since each gave rise to the next. Following the thing: the public/professional sector. Researching creativity demanded that fieldwork not conform to the expectations of traditional participant- observation of specific people in a particular place. The ideas of multi-sited fieldwork articulated by Marcus (1995, 1998) were more fitting for this research. I thus decided to enter the field through its most open and accessible location,which also matched my topic of interest. Since the public impetuses promoting Israel as a creative superpower do so by embracing a modernist-capitalist reading of creativity and equating it with innovation, I marked the unrestricted public material manifestations of creative technology as my starting point. Methodologically, I was "following the thing" (by "the thing" I am referring to any form of creative technology, as opposed to art). I visited as many unrestricted events displaying creative technological products as possible, while
29 maintaining a critical awareness of my decision to visit tech exhibitions rather than art galleries. My field became a series of moving objects and not a stationary home space. The use of cyberspace as an ethnographic tool is gaining attention and recognition. Anthropologists have increasingly acknowledged the growing importance of internet usage and of cyberspace as a hosting site of cultural discourses and cultural insights and advocated the application of fieldwork practices in virtual settings (Hart, 2004; Hine, 2015; Kozinets, 2010;Whitaker, 2004;Wilson, Peterson, & Leighton,2002; Wittel, 2000). Following DiMaggio,Hargittai, Neuman, and Robinson's (2001) observation that in the digital information age the internet reflects the material world and complements more traditional media, my initial method was underwritten by the assumption that virtually all events involving the display of creative products are publicized online and on the popular media channels. I applied this insight to the field in a twofold manner. First, I viewed the internet as a host of relevant discourses relating to the public face of Israeli creativity. I scrutinized the official governmental site of Masbirim Israel, founded by the Ministry of Public Diplomacy and other related private websites as well as viral videos,26 which are part of widespread initiatives seeking to rebrand and publicize Israel as a technological and creative superpower and overwrite its current reputation as a land of conflict. My second application was methodologically more significant. By browsing the internet, social networks, and public advertising, I was able to draw a multi-sited, methodological map from which I could select which various public creativity and technological innovation exhibitions to attend. The professional exhibitions that I attended were usually accompanied by a conference or colloquium and were thematically concerned with:defense and security technologies (three exhibitions), medicine (two exhibitions), agriculture and ecology (three exhibitions), design and industry (four exhibitions) and civilian/entrepreneurial high-tech (six exhibitions). I thus attended 18 exhibitions in total. Two of the exhibitions (one civilian/entrepreneurial and one agricultural) were of a more popular (rather than professional) character and were aimed at the general public:the first took place at theScience Museum in Jerusalem and the second atVolcani Center,the campus of the Agricultural Research Organization, not far from TelAviv. The other exhibitions took place in conference centers, hotels, colleges, and universities mostly in the center of the country (the TelAviv metropolitan area) but occasionallyin more peripheral cities. Alongside providing observation opportunities of the spatial configuration relating to the presentation of Israeli technological creativity and its concomitant rhetoric, that is,the social life of the commodities on display (Appadurai, 1988),the events were also a great source of informal conversations with the exhibition presenters and visitors. It was at these
26My personal favorite in this genre is a defiant, flag-waving, internet video entitled Before You Boycott Israel, in which the narrator advises, with the most sardonic undertones, that whoever wishes to successfully boycott Israel should refrain from using a wide range of products ranging from laptops and various medical procedures to weapons (!).It is implied that these inventions would have never seen the light of day were it not for Israel, and the inventions' eventual users should therefore be indebted.
30 exhibitions that I learned about two important Hebrew-language popular science magazines, Popular Science and Galileo. I subsequently subscribed to them and read them throughout my fieldwork. Aside from providing me with information about other events, these magazines helped me to better understandsome of the topics that spiked my informants' interests and imaginations. Alongside the presentations of creative technologies as finished products by established entrepreneurs and inventors, I also sought events in which creative identities were forged and evaluated in order to obtain a chronological sense of the creative entrepreneur's professional formation. I began attending various youth competitions in the field of innovation. Several science museums across the country as well as a chain of Israeli schools held such multi-themed annual competitions which I attended each year (five events in total). I also observed for two consecutive years an Israeli summer camp which provided Jewish children with the opportunity to practice innovation and entrepreneurship in the chosen land of the "start-up nation." In this camp, I served on the panel of judges assessing the seniors' presentations of entrepreneurial initiatives, a fortunate opportunity which gave me particular insight on the way in which creativity is evaluated.
In an attempt to understand the personal experience of being creative in Jewish- Israeli culture – namely, in the domains for which Israel is celebrated as a creative superpower – I simultaneously conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with inventors and entrepreneurs. The large majority worked either in high-tech (as entrepreneurs or salaried employees) or in entrepreneurship involving industrial inventiveness (inventors). A small minority were artists but involved in high-tech through providing services as designers and musicians, among others. I began the interviews with a small core of personal acquaintances, which began to snowball and grow. The initial personal core grew into a network of 27 interviewees (16 entrepreneurs, seven inventors, and three artists). In terms of education, all but one self-taught inventor held university degrees in their respective domains.While discussing income was not always comfortable, most of the interviewees hinted through references to their lifestyle (hobbies, holidays, etc.) that they belonged to the Israeli upper-middle class. Likewise, all of the interviewees lived either in the more affluent center of the country, namely in or around TelAviv, or in houses in moshavim, which has more to do with an urban- bourgeois reference to an improved quality of life in a rural setting than with farming,the original purpose of moshavim. The interviews were semi-structured in the sense that every interview included a series of questions that related to two principal themes: first, personal narratives of the interviewees' creative experiences and second,their opinions about Israel's status as a creative superpower. Following the people: the "geek" community. In 2010, after several months of fieldwork, I experienced a significant turning point in my research when I attended a
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Pecha-Kucha show in TelAviv for the first time. Pecha-Kucha events consist of short presentations of about sixminutes in front of a large audience accompanied by 20 images each shown for 20 seconds ona wide range of subjects –art, music, new technology, and personal journeys – which can all be incorporated in the vast category of creativity.27 One of the talks was given by Omer, one of the founders of the Space-IL project, the (only) Israeli team competing in the Google Lunar X-Prize competition.28 I found this fascinating, and after his presentation, I asked him for an interview. In his interview, Omer insisted that no work or research on Israeli creativity can be complete without addressing the activities, community, and unconferences initiated and sponsored by Yossi Vardi. Many of thosewho make up the core attendees of unconferences refer to themselves as "geeks," which refers to their domains of interest:high-tech, the internet, technological bricolage, sci-fi/fantasy media, and other aspects of geek culture.Through Omer, who introduced me to Yossi Vardi, I managed to get invited to my first unconference,where I established a network of personal contactswhich facilitated invitations to more unconferences. My initial participation served as a "recommendation" and affirmation that I too belonged to the geek community. In total, I attended 10 unconferences, three long events of several days and seven short one-day eventsin which I engaged in participant-observation. In terms of education, occupation, housing, and income, the "geeks" resembled the other aforementioned entrepreneurs and inventors with two notable related differences. First, most of the geeks are in their 30s and 40s in contrast to the older entrepreneurs and inventors interviewed. Second, many of them are alumni of elite intelligence units such as 8200. Though I engaged in many informal conversations with geeks through my participation in unconferences, I also conducted five semi-structured in-depth interviews with people from the geek community, which complemented the interviews with entrepreneurs albeit from another angle. In sum, in Marcus' (1995,1998) terms, I was "following the people" in the events in which they were celebrating creativity and sharing their passions and ideas. Enjoying another aspect of the internet's omnipresence in this field, the unconferences allowed me to become Facebook friends with many members of the geek community, and once the social media connection was established, the group's ideas and interests were easy to follow. Social media became another strategy for "following the people," as the geeks, inclined to using new media technology and eager to share ideas, opinions, and recommendations for links on issues dealing with technology, entrepreneurship, creativity and inspiration, inner thoughts, career changes, humor,
27The Pecha-Kucha format was created in 2003 by architects Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham in Tokyo, Japan. It has since spread to 700 cities and was brought to Israel by designers Anat Safran and Itay Mautner, who organize an event every couple of months. Safran and Mautner have maintained that the Tel Aviv events are the biggest Pecha-Kucha gathering in the worlds,indicating the Israeli propensity for creativity. 28 The Google Lunar X-Prize competition consists of successfully landing a ship on the moon, having it cross a distance of 500 meters, and communicating images back to earth. The prize is 30 million dollars which, had the team won, would have been donated to fostering technological education among children.
32 upcoming events, joys, pains, and information relating to their own ventures, made it easy to follow them. They put into practice the very things that many of them facilitated and relied on in their own internet, social media-based business endeavors. Through the web, members of the geek community pointed me toward two additional areas of interest which proved to be ethnographically significantin both physical attendance and intellectual inspiration; in Hine's (2015) terms, online relations opened up offline ethnographic spaces. The first area of interest was DIY (do-it-yourself) fairs, namely the Burning Man festival,29 and the second was a heightened interest in science fiction. As part of the methodological practice of "following the people," I attended two Israeli BurningMan events and followed the geek community to several events at Icon, the Israeli science-fiction and comic book festival in TelAviv between 2012 and 2014. A smaller community event related to this group called Garage Geeks takes place in the backyard of a decrepit workshop of one of the community members' parents in theindustrial zone of Holon, a city just outside Tel Aviv. The workshop is filled with various dismantled and partially assembled electrical and mechanical devices, leftovers and works in progress of the geeks' creative bricolage. Entrepreneurs and industry people from abroad were brought to this backyard where a projection and sound system were setup, and they partook in an evening of beer, wine, and stories of ideas and their execution.These monthly meetings were often hosted by Vardi himself. It was there that I met Max, a 60-year-old Canadian-Jewish microbiology professor, inventor, musician, and author of children's books, who taught creative thinking classes at a nearby college of design and engineering.I entered his circle of friends which included:Carmi, a 77- year-old ex-El Al pilot and highly prolific inventor with a restless mind, who well earned his label as the "genius" of the group; Oren, Max’s business partner, a 40-year-old dentist and entrepreneur in the field of renewable energy and biotechnology; and Michal,the 37-year-old librarian at Max's college. Several other professors, designers, and entrepreneurs were also members of Max's group, joining either briefly or for more extended periods of time. We met on a bi-monthly basis in the college cafeteria to discuss creativity, entrepreneurial projects, and various creative initiatives in the college. Regarding these initiatives, Michal was tasked with "representing the college," meaning that she commented on the feasibility and the level of interest of the institution and the students as they related to the ideas of the other group members. The culmination of this aspect of fieldwork came when Max asked me, as part of the gang, to help
29Created in San Francisco 1986 in by Larry Harvey and some friends, Burning Man describes itself as an annual event (at the heart of which an effigy of a man is set on fire) and a thriving year-round culture. Once a year, a temporary city is created in Black Rock City, Nevada where "attendees (or "Burners") dedicate themselves to the spirit of community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance. They depart one week later, leaving no trace" (Retrieved from http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/). In Israel, the local Burning Man community (called Midburn, combining the words Middle East, midbar [desert], and burn) was established by two brothers around 2011 and is comprised of a network of various individuals, among them artists and technology aficionados who also attend creativity events. Several entrepreneurs in the geek sector credit Burning Man with their creative inspiration.
33 organize an unconference called Birdbrain for the geek community and the college students, thus offering me the opportunity to engage in participatory action research (see Chevalier & Buckles, 2013). I was responsible for the workshop area, which I co-created, coordinated, and operated during the event. I co-organized Birdbrain twice, in 2012 and in 2013. Max became a key informant of my research. My relations with Max's group echo to a certain extent various science and technology ethnographies which, since at least the 1980s, have emphasized the informant's interest in the researcher's command of professional literature and the collaborative nature of researcher-informants relations (Hess, 2001).I wasn't only looking for information among those already in its possession, but rather I sought to contribute to my consultants' valuable insights from my own studies. Our common interests and respective journeys toward the clarification of the concept of creativity, albeit from differing perspectives, turned us into some kind of equal partners. Falzon (2009) wrote that ethnographers typically think of data as a gift from their informants, with all the implications of reciprocity that gift exchanges imply. My reciprocal interaction with my informants through exchanging insights and knowledge was powered by an overlapping desire to assist people who had since become friends in their journeys. As one of the prime features of unconferences is their participant-driven nature, my continued relevance in the field was consolidated by my ability to offer back a variety of (creative) insights about creativity. My knowledge of the academic literature about creativity allowed me to recommend books and articles, provide and challenge definitions of creativity, and contribute to discussions through examples garnered during my studies. My personal experience also took an unexpected turnwhen Ziv, an entrepreneur, computer programmer, psychologist, fellow improvisation theater aficionado, and overall bright mind, turned to me concerning his own interest in questions of creativity. Ziv offered to collaborate in devising creativity enhancing workshops for the public as a business venture. I asked Ziv for permission to treat our meetings and the workshops as ethnographic material, and he agreed on condition that I would not disclose the more elaborate creativity enhancing techniques we devised. The workshops served as a tool of elicitation, and following the workshops that we conducted on various occasions, we made acquaintances with people who had something to say about their experiences of creativity and about Israeli creativity. Most importantly, the workshops enabled me to fully engage in reciprocal relationships with my informants. The workshops were conducted in full several times and in a more fragmented format in several unconferences, events, Max's "creative thinking" college class, and various conversations and short talks, and it was through the workshop's insights that the full extent of my informants' curiosity aboutmy ability to make a significant contribution was satisfied; it was there that my professional fields of interest and personal creative
34 strengths merged with theirs. This is, of course, on the positive side. The tensions between my critical leaning and my informant's deep-seated perception of creativity as a positive talent are addressed later in this chapter. Following the idealization: children and secrecy.The methodology of this research was marked by two important issues that I call (again, inspired by Marcus, [1995,1998]) "following the idealization." The first related to the idealization of childlikeness. Aside from being of great importance in the field of creative events such as youth competitions, from the very early stages of fieldwork I encountered in both interviews and observations a recurring theme that strongly associated creativity or the creative habitus with children or achildlike state. James (2001) noted that many early ethnographies are steeped in evolutionist and racist assumptions about the proximity of the "noble savage" to the natural world and tend to see children as the "paradigm of the ideal man." Similarly, childhood, or a certain interpretation of childhood, was identified by many of my informants as metaphorically closer to a state of pure, natural, uncorrupted, rebellious, and unbridled creativity. I thus decided to include a thicker ethnography of children's creativity into my research repertoire. The opportunity to do so presented itself while I was negotiating the possibility of observing a youth competition/exhibition in a youth science center.I was referred by the director to a school, BeitNatan, which regularly participated in the event. At the school (an elementary school running fromgrades 1-6), I met with Etty, the coordinator of the school's young inventor's program. Etty was frequently accompanied by Menny, the father of one of the children, an industrial designer who referred to himself as an inventor and served as a technological advisor to the program. Equipped with a consent letter in which I stressed my obligation not to reveal the identity of the school or the students, I was introduced to the children as a "writer working on a book about creativity." In 2012 I was granted permission to attend the young inventors' class in BeitNatan for one semester. Every other week selected childrenfrom grades 3 and up would leave their regular classes, enter the classroom, and sit beneath a slightly shocking (to me) Thomas Edison quote hanging from a banner on the wall: "Anything I can't sell I don't want to invent." During these classes, under Etty's and Menny's supervision and guidance, students were encouraged to come up with marketable ideas that responded to daily problems in their own lives. These classes helped me follow my main informants' idealized metaphor, because they offered me a comparative account of this topic grounded in empirical observations. In other words, by looking at the culturally constructed character of children as they, under the teachers' guidance, were slowly being acculturated, I was able to identify the constructs from which older informants were trying to break free. From an ethnographic standpoint, I was following both "the thing" and "the people," not only because children are obviously "people" engaging in the creation of "things" but because their activities represented, for other "people"
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(adults), an idealized version of the processes required in order to create the ideal "thing." In this sense I was "following the idealization." The second issue in the category of "following the idealization" concerns the methodological investigation of the ways in which creativity, alleged superior creative skills, and creative elites are fantasized. In many respects this research is an example of "studying-up" (Nader, 1969), especially insofar as the geek community and most of the professional sector are concerned. As mentioned earlier, virtually all of my informants belonged to a social, technological, military (in the case of geeks), and, to the extent that they are indeed successful, economic Israeli elite. Throughout my fieldwork, the entrepreneurs and inventors, whose professional identities, personal contacts, and fields of interest challenge ethno-national borders, frequently travelled abroad to bigger conferences, unconferences, business meetings, tours, and exhibitions in which Israeli innovativeness was presented. I was not in a position to follow them but compensated for this by including many questions about their overseas experiences in my interviews and paying special attention to numerous collegial visits of foreign entrepreneurs which also produced relevant data. "Studying-up" generated another issue: secrecy. Secrecy, or rather confidentiality, was demanded of me in most interviews, exhibitions, and unconferences. This is embedded in two specific forces. First, in a capitalist cultural context that emphasizes intellectual property and its subsequent defense, secrecy is frequently product-oriented. Second, a structural secrecy linked to the IDF, the military- industrial complex, and Israel's secret agencies lies at the heart of many creativity- related endeavors, both as products and processes. Israeli censors and censorship were indirectly involved, and their shadow loomed over the past and present of many informants who asked to downplay or not discuss several points regarding their military service and ongoing projects. It was similarly evident in the restriction of the general public (myself included) from several invitation-only events concerned with the nurturing of creativity in a military context. Urban (1998) argued that the research of secret knowledge is entangled in a methodological double bind of epistemology and ethics,namely, the unattainability of the hidden secret on the one hand and the inability to reveal the hidden information (if obtained) as part of an ethical scholarship on the other. Urban thus proposed shifting the focus of research from the content of the secret to the tactics and the rhetorical strategies used to partially reveal orconceal the secret. I,likewise, opted to focus my ethnographic interest not on revealing secrets (which were, for the most part, indeed inaccessible) but rather on inquiring into the socially-constructed non-elite's idealized perception of what the elite is, does, or is capable of doing. This approach toward the gathering of ethnographical data is congruent with a more traditional interpretation of secrecy as a means of social control in a system of power relations (Benziman, 2011; Mitchell, 1993;
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Urban, 1998) and also relies on Marcus' (1983) claim that secretive exclusivity connotes superiority and denotes separation. Its methodological twist lies in its interest, not in the "real" secret but in the fantasy that secrecy excites regardingcreativity and in the people believed to be practicing it at its highest levels. The elite can thus befetishized by non- elites and its power idealized. By taking an interest in the fantasy rather than in actual power, this study took its final methodological turn and here, too, "followed the idealization." Regarding idealization, a certain reflexive remark is required. As will be discussed in the next chapter, the creative spark is undeniably pleasurable. Creativity gives a sense of the intellectual or sensuous joy often felt in the creative act,whether it is the positive or destructive use of creativity,such as in the (rather creative) deconstruction of a concept. But, at no moment do I claim that a deconstructionist approach, such as the one undertaken in this dissertation, favors an elitist understanding of creativity or creative elitism. Rather, I argue that deconstruction is perpetual movement. In this sense counter-discourse is not the truth but a truth, and my critique does not imply an idealization of one aspect of creativity; rather, it calls forth an awareness of all its possible meanings and interpretations and denounces the idealization of a single interpretation of the term, either positive or negative, as the end point of an intellectual journey. Both aspects should be counted. Emphasizing in speech only one aspect is in itself a telling narrative. Deconstruction opens the text for both criticism and self- criticism as a method of analysis.
Following the silence: a methodological comment.My friendships and involvement with my informants never affected myawareness of the need for a critical outlook. All the experiences with my informants, however pleasant, informative, and productive (notwithstanding occasional encounters with the darker side of human relations,e.g., arrogance, disagreement, impatience, and others), were still marked by an overarching important methodological issue. This refers specifically tothe inability to discuss topics pertaining to Israel's ethno-colonial moral failures and the perpetuation of violence, surveillance, and domination of Palestinians by creative means, at least in the cases in which Israel isnot perceived as the entity in need of creative protection from Arab hostility (the opposite, however, pervades the ethnography). These topics were not raised by my informants. In every interview or informal conversation at an event, it quickly became clear that politically-charged conversations were not welcome;informants with liberal sensibilities signaled me gently "not to spoil the vibe," and they remained silent, changed the subject, declined to engage in the discussion, or rejected any connection between creativity and moral wrongdoing (in the sense that the latter couldn't be considered creative). More aggressive interviewees, usually with a strong military background, refused to speak about the topic (due to military confidentiality) or implied
37 that my understanding of these matters was inadequate (probably because I hadn't been involved in these activities during my own military service).I soon made a deliberate and conscious decision to no longer ask them about it directly and to leave the near-total absence of political polemics from the interviews intact. At first, this choice was guided by methodological considerations. Given the studying-up nature of this research, I was not willing to endanger access to valuable ethnographic spaces or relations with informants. Being invited to unconferences and exclusive circles and fitting into the entrepreneurs' busy schedule was challenging,and I could not afford to antagonize powerful and influential individuals. As Lee (1993) remarked, in all that concerns researching sensitive topics,the researcher is entitled to as much protection as the subjects. However, this handicap later turned into a new interpretationof the field. On the one hand,I was committed to a professional, truthful, and accurate representation of the field as it chose to represent itself, and this remains the bulk of this dissertation. On the other hand, my moral anthropological philosophy is inspired by Geertz's (2001) last sentence from his last book (and its highly symbolic location) in which he stated that anthropologists have a moral obligation for hope. Instead of overlooking these silences, I followed Basso's (2009) suggestion (a possible precursor to Derrida) that the analysis of choice within verbal repertoires should specify instances in which members of a community do not speak,and thus referred to the silences as questions open to balanced interpretation. As Kidron (2009) argued, absence and silence are not necessarily signs of an underlying pathology, an assumption that derives from the Eurocentric norm of voice. Through interviews with children of Holocaust survivors who testified to the nonpathological nature of inter-generational silence, she exposed the logocentrism that undergirds conventional psychology. In my case, the avoidance of polemical topics did not necessarily signify the muting of political dissident voices, and I did not automatically refer to all silences during my fieldwork as repression or silencing. However, my informants – many of whom are alumni of prestigious military units – are well-aware of the existence of creative militarism in Israel, in both its defensive and oppressive forms. In some cases, when the ethnographer produces a specific stimulus which is met by certain responses – such as gently changing the subject, being dismissive or condescending, an outright refusal to speak, thematic omissions, hesitations or a lack of verbal generosity (as I show in the ethnography) – then it is the ethnographic encounter itself that serves as a marker of an absence which maybe of a more political nature.The very presence of the people with whom I spoke – military personnel in the past or present who introduced themselves as such as part of their creative personas–even when they chose not to speak,can testify to the absence of certain texts, that is, military actions, since spoken texts can signify absent authors (see Handelman, 1993) and informant's bodies (not only their presence but also their posture, tone,etc.) carry and communicate knowledge (Dragojlovic, 2014). The presence of
38 creative applications in the military context and their malevolent potential is something which is not spoken about yet is present in some form in the encounter.It became my duty as an ethnographer to question this silence and the avoidance of discussing malevolent creativity, when military personel, employed by the army to develop creative ideas for example, refrained from talking about the use ofthese ideas in fighting the Palestinians even within the constraints of certain obligations to secrecy. My questioning of the silence and avoidance was open to interpretation. If silence and evasion of talk about negative creativity were accompanied by attempts to redirect the conversation to positiveness, as they often were, then one of the possible and even plausible interpretations of the text would be that negativity as a sub-textual repression hovers over that same positiveness as an integral, albeit unspoken, part of it. In other words, a focus on the accentuated presence of ideas about the positiveness of creativity made me aware of the absence of the negative aspects and of the fact that by cooperating with this silence, I was also reconstructing the silence of malevolent creativity and its possibilities and probabilities in Israel. This is the heart of my final chapter.
Methodology summary. The gathering of the ethnographic data for this study employed a strategy of multi-sited fieldwork as articulated by Marcus (1995,1998). It comprised four types of "followings." The field was constructed with an initial interest in the presentation of Israeli technological creative products in 18 professional and popular exhibitions and fiveyouth competitions;fieldwork thus began with "following the thing" (the thing=creative technologies). During this initial phase, two other important related thematic and ethnographic fields opened up which entailed two other "followings": "following the people" and "following the idealization." By "following the people," I referred to participant observation within the geek community,one of Israel's creative entrepreneurial elites, in 10 unconferences – festive events devoted to the celebrating of creativity. This "following" was enhanced by the fields' interest in me as an academic authority on creativity, andthisled to participatory action research on several occasions. During my following of "the thing" and "the people," I conducted a total of 32 semi-structured in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs, industrial inventors, and people working in high-tech. By "following the idealization," I referred to two issues. First, inspired by the pervasive theme of an idealized childlike creativity in other sectors, I observed achildren's inventor's class throughoutone semester. Second, the structural concealment and inaccessibility of several creativity related practices and achievements prompted a treatment of the idealized fantasy concerningthe non-elite's perception of creativity as a concept of unusual potency, especially when practiced by elites. Finally, by "following the silence," I maintained a critical awareness of the sidelined negative creativity. My ethnographic findings are presented in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4.
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Structure, Form, and Content Before proceeding, I briefly present the general structure of the dissertation and the form and content of the following chapters. Chapter 2 is a roadmap of my theoretical and thematic arrangement of a comprehensive review of the academic literature on creativity, garnered from a wide range of interrelated disciplines. This literature refers to the discursive strands that shape creativity as a positive cultural phenomenon. It is divided into two sections: "Divinity,"which refers to the sub-textual supremacy of creative agents and the eeriness of creativity in several theologized and de-theologized forms, and "The Human Condition,"which refers to the importance of creativity in a modernist-capitalist context and to the basic human engagement in various forms of struggle and resistance. From these, I extract three influential root metaphors that power creativity's positiveness and suppress their negative constituents and guide my analysis of the ethnographic findings. Chapter 3 is the first of the two ethnographic chapters. It addresses the celebrated public frontstage of Jewish-Israeli creativity. It is divided into two interconnected thematic subchapters. The first is entitled "Childlikeness," that is, the public pervasiveness of the assertion that creativity has something to do with children, childhood, or a childlike state. The second, "Miraculousness,"refers to the rhetorical strategies and constituents involved in the cultural construction of Israel's creative achievements as miraculous and of Israel as a creative superpower.The chapter ends with a discussion about the interconnectivity of both themes as they relate to Jewish- Israeli creativity. Chapter 4 is the second ethnographic chapter and complements Chapter 3 by referring to the backstage of Jewish-Israeli creativity, in other words,ethnographic material of a more controversial or hidden nature which is not celebrated, present, or fully acknowledged in the frontstage. Like Chapter 3, it is divided into two subchapters.The first, "Backstage Critique,"deals with the evaluation and reservations expressed privately by informants about the frontstage themes. The second is entitled "Omnipotent Guardianship" and relates to structural parallels between the Jewish genius, the creativity of Israel's secret military units, and the infinity of the concept of creativity. These partake in the construction of creativity wielded by an elite citizenry as a protector of the Jewish-Israeli ethnos. The chapter ends with a conclusion about the ways in which the backstage both supports and challenges the frontstage and with several reflections on creativity's positiveness, negativity, and status as a partially opaque concept. Chapter 5 delves deeper into post-structuralist thought and psychoanalytical repression.It concludes this research by offering a theoretically fertile concept, termed "cultural reverence,"which derives directly from the ethnography and its analysis.This concept, composed of five characteristics, can be used to further enhance the theoretical
40 exploration of creativity in subsequent research and to deconstruct and understand a wide array of cultural idioms that are treated similarly to creativity in the Jewish-Israeli national context. By presenting the notion of "cultural reverence," this final chapter also engages more critically with various forms of violence toward post-colonial minorities as they relate to creativity,thus integrating into the discussion what has been unjustifiably absent and barely referred to throughout thefieldwork. The current chapter began by presenting the goals of this research: the exploration of creativity's positiveness and its significance in the Jewish-Israeli national context. I then focused on the two principal introductory aspects of the dissertation that are directly related to the goals:first, I presented the assertion that creativity today is constructed as positive alongside its definition, and second, I provided a historiographical account of what I termed the Jewish-Israeli elitism-paranoia nexus or, in other words, the self-perception of creativity in the Jewish-Israeli national context.These are elaborated on in Chapter 2which exposes and plots a theoretical roadmap for understanding the cultural, Western-influenced, global perception of creativity as positive. This roadmap is based, first and foremost, on the post-structuralist specifically Derridean deconstructionist theoretical framework for this analysis. Chapter 2 employs Plotnisky's (2004) observation thatdeconstructionis a way of rethinking a given concept or phenomenon which may appear familiar and simple but is in fact constituted through complex intellectual, linguistic, psychological, or cultural processes.The positiveness of creativity is one such familiar, simple, and self-evident phenomenon. The ongoing processes that created (and perpetuate) it are explored in- depth in the chapter's theoretical roadmap, thus providing thematic substance to the deconstructionist outlook of this dissertation which follows, particularly, Derrida's concept of différance.This chapter contextualizes the Jewish-Israeli elitism-paranoia nexus, which is then exemplified in the ethnographic chapters,and connects it to the logic of global movement toward interest in creativity. The local appreciation and positive evaluation of creativity do not exist independently of much larger sets of practices, beliefs, and other historical diachronic socio-cultural dynamic developments, rooted primarily in Judeo-Christian tradition and contemporary Western culture. As shown in the subsequent ethnographic chapters, the local epistemology, phenomenology, and ontology of creativity is best understood as an adaptation, largely informed by a complex web of meanings (the theoretical roadmap) that are not endemic to a supposedly unique and unaffected Jewish-Israeli culture. In both those senses, Chapter 2 serves as a transition from the introduction (Chapter 1) to the ethnography in Chapters 3 and 4. Lastly, a comprehensive and detailed account of the whys and hows of creativity's positivenesshas not, to date,been assembled or adequately presented. In this sense, Chapter 2 constitutes this dissertation's first contribution to the academic literature on creativity.
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Chapter 2: "Blinding Lights, Feeble Darkness": Creativity and Positiveness – A Theoretical Roadmap
Introduction Several writers across the social sciences have taken note of this research's foundational observation, namely,thatone of the principal cultural features of creativity is that it is universally perceived as positive (Boden, 1994; Cropley, 2010;Löfgren, 2001;Lubart, 1999). Albert and Runco (1999) asserted that any history (or narration) of creativity is not the history of creativity but a history of creativity. The transition from the to a in their argument is, essentially, an act of deconstruction, as it does not acknowledge a cultural position as an inherent truth. Since this dissertation's intention is to advocate an ethnographically-based comprehensive, mature, and critical approach to the positiveness of creativity as a cultural construct, this chapter presents a review of the academic literature on creativity, providing an historical review of the concept and focusing on the discursive cultural strands that shape creativity as imperatively positive. As these inclinations are reflective of the discourse with which creativity is infused in many fields across the humanities, I connect anthropological thought with various disciplines (psychology, philosophy, organizational studies, and others) which all treat creativity with equal passion, both in research that highlights the positiveness of creativity (and creativity's related fields), and in the positive depictions of creativity in academic as well as popular discourse. In the review of the literature relating to creativity, I follow the theoretical propositions of three prominent thinkers in this respect:Derrida, Foucault, and Crick. The first and most important is, as mentioned, Derrida and requires some elaboration. Derrida's concept of différance refers to the idea that concepts cannot be constructed but canonly differentiate from a plurality of objects (which must already be present) (Wheeler, 1999). Since I am talking about moral valence, positiveness obviously differs from malevolence in terms of character, just asGod can be said to differ from Satan (as discussed below). However, I pay equal attention to deference and to my specific reading of Derrida in this sense. Specifically, I rely on Derrida's emphasis on temporality (Radhakrishnan, 1987; Söderbäck, 2013). For Derrida, time itself does not exist independently of observation, which is the process of writing, and the entire idea of history and philosophy has been authorized by the right and the privilege of the present (Söderbäck, 2013). I show that all of the cultural strands that refer to creativity refer to the positiveness of creativity as a presence of the present. For instance, in a linear mythological course, Satan always follows the God-creator (for example, first as an agent of God, later banished from heaven). The dark side defers from the light in its delayed presentation. It is a future present (preceded by good) or a past present (won over by good), and although well-known, it is inherently absent. Second, I am inspired by the
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Foucauldian notion of discourse and "archeology" (1969,1976) since, like the topics of madness or sexuality treated by Foucault, creativity has the "how,"the "when," and the "in what terms" (which can be conjured up as acts of investigative archeology of discourse); it is allowed to be discussed and identified as such, making these instances appear as "truth." Third, I also follow Crick's (1982) advocacy for an "anthropology of knowledge," (with knowledge referring to rules, values, and beliefs) about creativity. I use the bibliographic research as data in order to offer an in-depth exploration of the cultural themes and impetuses that consolidate creativity as unequivocally positive. It is important, though, to note that this deconstruction is ultimatelynot so much about dissecting the whole into its components, but, as Nuyen (1987) noted, by arguing that traditional philosophy destroys wholeness by imagining that it has well-defined parts and then abandoning the whole for one of the imagined parts. Foucault's archeology provides these well-defined parts. Derrida explains the abandonment of the whole, an abandonment which is an act of repression of negative constituents, as creativity had always been both positive and negative. Crick presents the imagined result (and all three partake in each other's deconstruction). I do not present absolute knowledge. By combining all three, I present an archeology of fragmented knowledge that probes creativity's positiveness. This chapter is divided into two parts,"Divinity" and "The Human Condition"in which I elaborate on three major and highly influential interrelated root metaphors (one in "Divinity" and two in "The Human Condition") to which creativity's positiveness can be attributed in Western culture. In each part and its related root metaphor, I highlight thedifférant opposition between good and negative/malevolent creativity, showing that the former far outweighs the latter in presence and differs in character. The three root metaphors promoting creativity's positiveness are as follows. From "God to man" to "God in man." This refers to creativity's early association with divine powers and its subsequent reformulation in contemporary times as a divine spark of human self-actualization, notably in the arts and humanistic psychology. It is accompanied by a phenomenology of heightened vitality and a materialization of a de-theologized opacity and a sense of infinity. It also refers to a discursive link between creativity, positiveness, and children and the perception of children as "little angels of creativity." Modernism and capitalism.Thisrefers to creativity as a prime means of achieving economic prosperity and (technological) progress, especially through its interpretation as nearly interchangeable with innovation and creative entrepreneurship. Struggle, resistance, and agency. This refers to the celebration of human agency through practices of resistance to control and coercion and the glorification of individual and collective creative and innovative heroism, when either facing personal
43 struggles or set on a collision course with persecuting and tyrannical forces. It also refers to an affirmation of the basic, inherently human capacity for change.
Part 1: Divinity
From "God to Man" to "God in Man"
I begin with the "God in man" root metaphor. As shown below, creativity has a long history that is explicitly associated with divinity, and this association has prevailed and blended into the secularization it has undergone.The creative agency attributed to God and higher powers (manifesting through human conduits, i.e., men made in the image of the creator) prior tothe Renaissance was reincarnated in various inherent attributes of exceptional people and exceptional states of mind:first through the concept of the "genius" and later through the importance of phenomenological dimensions which involve an epistemic openness to different or unusual planes of experience. These include imagination, incubation, inspiration, flashes of insight, mind-altering states, and peak experiences. They are especially associated with domains that Löfgren (2001) claimed anthropological research was saturated with –artistic life, religion, and ritual – as well as in Freudian and humanistic branches of psychological discourse. In other words, the creation process, originating in divine omnipotence and omniscience, retains its positiveness phenomenologically as human and yet out-of-ordinary experiences that rise above mundanity and provide a heightened phenomenology of living intensely and fully. God relates to creativity in several ways: as an entity that can be said to exercise creativity (Bawulski & Watkins, 2012) and as a term interchangeable with creativity in the sense that both can be argued as fitting metaphors for the (super)natural serendipitous activeness of life and both are beyond total human comprehension (Kaufman, 2007). Furthermore, God is the ultimate primal mythical creator. Although pre-Christian views associated genius with the protecting powers of a guardian spirit, it is widely agreed that the earliest conception of creativity in Western culture is the biblical story of Genesis30(Albert &Runco, 1999; Negus & Pickering, 2004). The medieval orthodoxy of this creation is that God created "out of nothing" (creatio ex-nihilo)31 (Pope, 2005), a concept whose heroic inclination seduces to this day in anthropogenic creative endeavors (Friedman, 2001).Several writers have pitted the conceptions of creativity in the "West" against the conceptions of creativity in the "East" (referring to Taoist and
30Likewise in Judaism, God stands as the sole creator. Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, in his book Jewish Meditation (1981)commentedthat the Zohar, addressing a verse from the Biblewith regards to the stars (Isaiah 40:26), stresses two key words in the verse: MI (who) and ELeH(these). When these two words are combined, the Hebrew letters spell out ELoHIM (the Hebrew word for God). Thus, Kaplan wrote, when one looks at the "these" – things in the ordinary mundane world – and asks "who?" – namely, who is the author and basis of these things?–one finds God . 31Pope (2005) quoted John Locke saying: "As when a new particle of matter doth begin to exist…and had before no being, and this we call Creation."
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Dharmic religions), where the concept of creatio ex-nihilo has no analogue in cosmologies stressing natural cycles, harmony regularity, and balance (Albert & Runco, 1999; Lubart, 1999; Pope, 2005). These cosmologies are said to share to some extent the Platonic views that nothing new is possible and that art is merely an attempt to mimic ideal forms (Albert & Runco, 1999). In either form, the power of God to create entails a certain exclusivity. Although, as the Prometheus myth instructs, creation and discoveries may be stolen from the gods and given to man, the dominant Judeo-Christian view limits the act of creation to God, saying that the creature itself cannot create. In other words, God, and whatever he may represent in any secularized version, precedes any other attempt to create. This view is exemplified in a twofold manner. First, it can be seen in inherent human capacities regardless of their desire to create and specifically in the assertion that while Adam and Eve had the power to name (which, nevertheless, may be seen as a cultural base for creating), they did not possess the God-like power of creation (Pope, 2005). Second, it is apparent in the cultural reception of humanity's active attempts to create, as seen in the Frankenstein motif (and its derivatives such as the story of the Golem), which were portrayed in a distinctly negative light Pope, 2005), as were the attempts of humanity to reach a God-like state, with the tower of Babel serving as its most prominent example (McLaren, 1993). Of course, the identity of the beneficiaries associated with creativity's positiveness and active agency within such a cosmology is worthy of note. Heavily related to being a God-like ability, creativity has been consistently endowed with a misogynistic penchant manifesting in the attribution of creative power to males. The Romans referred to creation and genius as a male power, which can be passed on to children, birth being the sole exception (Albert &Runco, 1999). Muses, according to Pope (2005), were a patriarchal recognition of female creativity only to the extent that they inspire and thereby assist the male poet. The basic idea of the God-creator also fits this tendency. In The Seed and the Soil (1991), Delaney depicted a symbolic engendering of a cosmology that relates to a "monogenetic" theory of procreation in accordance with theological monotheism, in which the generating active male creates (life) andthe female is relegated to the task of providing sustaining passive support. This claim, implying that man is the human counterpart of the God-creator, corresponds with the idea of the "maleness" of the anthropogenic act of culture creation, with women viewed as being more rooted in or havingmore direct contact with the category of "nature" (Ortner, 1974). Therefore, men's perception as being superior to women through their association with culture's superiority over nature, which is embedded as an extension of the ultimate divine act of creation, subsequently entails another advantageous construct for men: being perceived as (super)"natural" agents of creativity.
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This orthodox Christian acknowledgement of God or other supernatural forces as creators remained largely uncontested during the MiddleAges, when special talents and unusual abilities were viewed with suspicion and attributed to an outside spirit for which the individual was a conduit. In this regard, the identification of creativity and the act of creation with the inherently good God necessitates a discussion connecting creativity to Divinity's dark side,the forces of Satan and Satanism. It is here that the primordial Manichean difference is manifested fully. Partridge and Christianson (2009) observed that although in classical Greek mythology the daimon is either a malevolent or a benevolent spirit, in Christianity it is understood solely as malevolent. Satan and various demons were originally members ofthe court of heaven, working as agents provocateurs in the court of God, not unlike figures such as the trickster or joker (sometimes a negative force and sometimes a cultural hero) often mentioned as prime mythical creative personas in various non-Abrahamic religions and cultures (Leeming, 1990; Pope, 2005).The Christian faith has, over time, construed Satan as fallen or banished from heaven and becoming an opponent or adversary to God;Satan both differs from God in essence and defers from God in the separation of the realm he rules over from heaven,whose creation was only due to Satan's fall from grace. As such, the figure of Satan, like the trickster or the vampire,is a cultural rebel, a symbolic leader advocating outrageous alternative patterns of living in a culture demanding conformity (Maxton, 1999). He is indeed a creative being. These ideas are explicitly expressed in Lavey's non- theological Church of Satan (established in 1966) and his foundational text,The Satanic Bible (1969). This text begins with the nine satanic statements of which the first two32can be perceived as an invitation to celebrate life and an encouragement of creative achievements as opposed to the overly restrained and ascetic Christian faith. Satan is an agent of disruption between the creator andthe people's faith in him, tempting humankind into wrongdoing. Of course, humankind in the Middle Ages referred primarily to men, since women embodied much of the interest in demonic alliances with humans through the witch trials, the female being fundamentally allied with otherness (Briggs,1996;Gijswijt-Hofstra, 1999). The power of Satan to tempt and disrupt refers to the capacity to bestow gifts upon humanity (among them sexual favors), which lead to the sins of greed, lust, violence and vanity. In Christian demonology, Belphegor, a Moabite god absorbed into Hebrew lore and then Christianity as a major demon, deserves a special mention. Associated with the deadly sin of sloth,33 Belphegor is linked to creativity through his ability to bestow wealth and to make discoveries and create inventions in order to tempt men (Guiley, 2009). Perhaps the most famous cultural trope in this category is the Faustian bargain, which refers to the seductive power of evil to transform people into creative geniuses in the present in exchange for suffering in the
32The first two Satanic statements are: "Satan represents indulgence instead of abstinence!" and "Satan represents vital existence instead of spiritual pipedreams!" (Lavey, 1969 p.12) 33Interestingly, several of my informants defined creativity as a combination of laziness and intelligence.
46 future or in other areas of life in the present. One example of this is professional success achieved at the cost of failure in personal relationships, as reflected in the biographies of many creative geniuses(Gardner, 1993; La Fontaine, 1999). The forces of Satan thus operate discursively on three levels. First, God's dark side is populated by agents that have a certain creative appeal and provide cultural tropes through which human creativity can be understood and acknowledged. Second, they constitute an affirmation that the creative act does indeed originate in supernatural abilities and is somehow connected to the divine realm. The third level relates to the inequality between God and Satan and is the most important, and therein lies the différance. The forces of Satan retracted considerably from the seventeenth century onward due to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the emphasis on rationalism, and the emergence of modern medicine (Porter, 1999). Faith in God also diminished during this period, albeit to a far lesser extent, thereby creating a cultural climate in which Satan had nearly completely disappeared, relegated to the category of past-present, in contrast to a present and prevailing God. Furthermore, good and evil are not matched opponents in the Christian faith, primarily because God alone is the creator. The evil powers are subject to the authority of God, the supreme power of God's powers, (Partridge &Christianson, 2009). Even in the ongoing presence of charismatic Satanic agents as antagonists in the popular literature and filmography of comic book villains (the pathological souls of mad geniuses) and in the fantasy genre (the disfigured bodies or unsettling elegance of the villains), the power of the dark side is always subject to the supposedly victorious powers of love, good, freedom, friendship, and virtue. In this regard, the forces of Satan promote two cultural undercurrents: the minor one refers to the continuing lure of the dark side in contemporary Satan-inspired creative endeavors (namely in the heavy/death metal musical genre);the major one is the direct recognition of the asymmetrical opposition of God and Satan, the acknowledgement that God the creator is the stronger force and that the "God in man" metaphor remains worthy of its name, as the power of Satan has been sidelined within the contextual discourse of the divine realm. A shift in the orthodox view, which denies that human creativity is disconnected from the supernatural, occurred during the Renaissance, when, in emerging secular circles, man replaced God as the agent to which the authorship of the Bible (and, subsequently, creation) was attributed,34and creativity became a legitimate subject for research (Albert &Runco,1999).35 Starting around the Renaissance, the attribution of
34This period, according to Montuori and Purser (1995), was marked by a shift from mimetic to anthropocentric art, with artists taking center stage (as opposed to being self-effacing in order to reproduce sacred images) and thus becoming analogous to the God-creator, and by a rise in individualism accompanied by an exaggerated fear of conformity. It is the latter which ultimately evolved, especially under the influence of Romanticism, into the cultural stereotype of the lone, creative individual pitted against conservative society, an issue eventually evolving into an ethos of social defiance which is expanded on below. 35The Renaissance is designated as a major peak of creative achievements (Gray, 1972).
47 creative capacity from a singular God to human geniuses and then to increasingly "ordinary" individuals and social networks – or, in Glăveanu's (2010) terms, from "Him" (the God-creator) to"He" (the lone genius) to "I" (the ordinary individual) to "We" (the collective effort) –has continued until the present-day perception of creativity as an integral part of human existence. Nevertheless, it should be noted that prominent art and science figures, in other words, elites –leaders, heroes, great men (literally,the "elect," namely,those formally chosen in some social process and, particularly in a theological context, those chosen by God [Marcus, 1983])36 – had been designated by both cultural movements as exemplars of creativity. This notion of the "elect" pervades some of the academic literature on creativity and reinforces the linkage between creativity and divinity, long after its supposed separation. Specifically, today, the tension between creativity-as-admired and creativity-as-ordinary can be found in the use of the terms "little c creativity," (worthy, but not revolutionary creativity), "mini c creativity" (ordinary/everyday creativity), and "big C Creativity" (eminent Creativity) (Amabile, 1996; Beghetto & Kaufman, 2009; Simonton, 1996). Later, under the influence of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, two models of creativity emerged, representing the contrasts between the material and the spiritual, science and art, rationality and emotionality, and forms of creative experiences (Liep, 2001; Nickles, 1994).I address these dichotomic models by reviewing first the transition from "Him" to "I" under the influence of Romanticism. The influence of the Enlightenment is addressed separately in the following subchapter as a precursor to the discussion on modernism and capitalism. In reaction to the Enlightenment's championing of reason, Romanticism emphasized creative imagination as a prime human faculty located inside the individualin the self-exploration of one's imaginative depths and inner feelings. The latter were referred to as a natural source of wisdom and inspiration as well as an invitation to a full realization of human potential expressed through artistic creativity (Montuori & Purser, 1995; Negus & Pickering, 2004; Nickles, 1994; Pope, 2005; Taylor, 1989 ;Weiner, 2000). Creativity is thereby deeply linked with nature as a spiritual romantic companion, stretching from Rousseau to 1960's counterculture creativity (Pope, 2005) and seen as bringing balance back to secularized and utilitarian societies (Negus & Pickering, 2004). By the end of the eighteenth century, as the words "creativity" and "creativeness" made their first appearance in the English language37 (Weiner, 2000), the concept's positiveness grew stronger through its association with imagination, the fashioning of something new, human potential, and art.The latter is especially important.
36Montuori and Purser (1995) described the use of the contemporary term "gifted," to designate a creative individual as a cultural remnant of this discursive association. The parallel in Hebrew is the word "mekhunan." 37Creativity during that time was still not a separate concept but rather incorporated in prolonged discussions relating to genius, originality, exceptionality, innate ability, and freedom which eventually came together in the eighteenth- century doctrine of individualism (Sternberg & Lubart, 1999).
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Creativity's discursive positive aura through its association with a notion of spirituality and higher powers is heavily indebted to its relationship withthe domain of art. The first firm association of the term "creative" with an elevated, deeply hierarchical and narrow view of art, as in the "creative arts," occurred around the middle of the nineteenth century and was an essential part of the late Romantic elevation of the artist/author as genius (Pope, 2005). Congruent with Firth's (1992) claim that religion itself is a human art and with McLaren's (1993) assertion that in our materialistic age many people probably seek in the mysteries of art the solace that used to be found in the mysteries of religion, anthropologists have taken note of the widespread inclination to refer to art as inseparable from creativity, as well as its instar religio cultural status. Hastrup (2001) noted that, "whether decorative, performative or literary, the hallmark of the arts is precisely their creativity, at least within Western notions of art. And this, of course, is why they present themselves so forcefully as exemplars of cultural creativity" (p. 31). Espousing Hastrup's stance while also offering a comment on the power of apparently de-theologized art, Gell (1992a) wrote a powerful paragraph in "The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology":
It is widely agreed that ethics and aesthetics belong in the same category. I would suggest that the study of aesthetics is to the domain of art as the study of theology is to the domain of religion. That is to say, aesthetics is a branch of moral discourse which depends on the acceptance of the initial articles of faith: that in the aesthetically valued object, there resides the principle of the True and the Good, and that the study of aesthetically valued objects constitutes a path towards transcendence. In so far as such modern souls possess a religion, that religion is the religion of art, the religion whose shrines consist of theatres, libraries, and art galleries, whose priests and bishops are painters and poets, and whose dogma is the dogma of universal aestheticism. Unless I am very much mistaken, I am writing for a readership which is composed in the main of devotees of the art cult.(p. 41-42) The association of creativity with the (appropriately termed) creative arts has enhanced the apotheosis of creativity. If the latter is indeed a salient feature of the arts, which in contemporary Western thought are endowed with lofty values and constitute, according to Gell, the spiritual infrastructure of a faithless dominant elite of literati, then creativity as a concept in the cultural context of this current study does more discursively than just denote the ability to create something. It refers to a process heavily encoded with a positiveness that derives its essence from an implicit association with a religiously-inspired higher domain of morality, consciousness, existence, and abilities. On a more phenomenological and somewhat more mystical plane,creativity has been mentioned as inherent to exceptional figuresincluding artists and messengers of
49 higher powers and toexperiences related to the anti-structure of liminal timeframes through which new and disruptive meanings, social relations, identities, and phenomenologies can be produced. Lavie, Narayan, and Rosaldo (1993) dedicated the first collection of anthropological papers on creativity to the memory of Victor Turner, for whom,they asserted, creativity flows from the liminal margins of society to its mainstream.The collection features extensively mystical characters and liminal types as agents of creativity –gurus, healers, storytellers, shamans, and other allegorical figures – all characterized by their ability to plunge into (either collective or private) magical and unconscious realms. Montuori and Purser (1995) noted that artistic creativity also implicitly continued on earlier meanings of magic and metaphysicality, implying that the poet was a messenger of higher powers,38 either by benefiting from otherworldly assistance or by being able to elevate himself and others to superior planes of reality. Creative arts (especially music) both originate in and serve as means to attain the liminal and activate a spiritual link, thus arousing mystical love (Qureshi,1986)39or achieving peak experiences (Kingsbury,1988;Lowis, 2002) as its more secular counterpart. Furthermore, the anti-structure of the liminal phase offers plenty of room for phenomenological experimentation of other states of mind (Hodder, 1998).40 Nickles (1994) posited that the Romantic account of discovery is more punctiform, as discoveries typically come as flashes of intuition to geniuses – people who may be trained experts but who have a superhuman epistemic channel open to them and operate outside of established circles. As most can be trained to be technicians but few experience non- rational revelatory flashes, this idea of an art that has no method and therefore cannot be taught befits the glorification of the individual genius exalted above the masses by virtue of his creativity which is more spiritual in nature (Montuori&Purser, 1995; Nickles, 1994). These themes have influenced contemporary psychological approaches to creativity. Several writers have noted the neglect of creativity by twentieth-century psychological research due to itsroots in a tradition of mysticism and spirituality, which is associated with lucky guesses and irrationality and romanticized as fundamentally mysterious (Gigerenzer, 1994; Sternberg &Lubart, 1999). Conversely, Pope (2005) noted that secularization did not mean the end of religion's influence but merely its reformulation into other modes of discourse, with the mysteries of the psyche implicitly replacing the supernatural:
38Many contemporary artists have exemplified this issue through claims that their art is merely dictated to them. John Lennon, for example, distinguished between songs written due to the contractual obligations of releasing a new album and the "music of the spheres," which surpasses understanding and for which he was merely a channel (Negus &Pickering, 2004). 39Qureshi's (1986) work refers to South Asian Sufism, specifically to Qawwali musicians whose goal is to inspire mystical experiences within the audience. 40Hodder (1998) noted that that the experience of liminality generates moments in which people "let their minds go," "think about something else," "empty their minds," "freely associate," or "let their minds go blank" (p. 74). These are expressions that were frequently used by my informants to describe creative processes.
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Where once were inspiration by gods and muses and the inspirational working of natural genius are now, it seems, the unseen prompting and subterranean eruptions of unconscious desires, hopes, fears. Psychology has taken over the roles previously assumed by religion and myth in providing the dominant discourse for the more mysterious aspects of the creative process….the workings of the unconscious may be incidentally revealed through such everyday activities by dreaming, day-dreaming or slips of the tongue. (pp. 70-71) Indeed, researchers from various psychology-related disciplines have ascribed creative agency to the unconscious, which is eventually manifested in an illuminating revelation of a creative thought.4142The preconscious and the unconscious are referred to as the loci of the most creative work, with the preconscious especially noted for its successat solving problems because it encounters fewer constraints than the conscious (Runco, 1999). Of related relevance to the issue of consciousness in terms of its malleability, the importance of altered or transitional states to creativity, either self- induced (such as meditation, mind-expanding drugs, or engaging in imaginative journeys) or natural (reverie, connected to sleep) has also been emphasized (Krippner, 1999). In this sense, the concept of the psyche's mysterious depths adds up to the mysteries of art and religion as gateways to the extraordinary and the unusual. Creativity is, furthermore, beneficial in its mysteriousness when implied to be an unperishable and infinite resource of ideas (and lauded as such), as performances in creative tasks have been found favored by darkness and dim lighting (Steidle & Werth, 2013),43which allow the mind to wander further off in unconstrained spaces. This aspect shares the numinous mysteriousness – "overpowering-majestas," to use Otto's (1917) term –of unstructured, awe-inspiring infinite spaces that can be found in religion. Ittherefore constitutes yet another link between mystery, religion, and creativity, as it construes the search for and promise of discoveries in art and science as a quasi-religious source of intellectual beauty, a threshold between rationality and the ethereal.44Furthermore, following Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) linguistic model of metaphorical concepts, it is interesting to
41These illuminations are not solely indebted to Freudian-inspired structural models of the mind but also to Wallas' (2014/1926) model of creative thought in which the unconscious stages of incubation (a period of "not consciously thinking about the problem" and illumination, i.e., "the appearance of the idea,") are preceded by preparation (when a problem is investigated in all directions) and succeeded by verification (the conscious testing of a solution). 42The discourse associating spirituality and creativity in the arts may be more powerful, but it is nevertheless very much present in the sciences, namely, in the famous anecdote of chemist August Kekule's (1829–1896) discovery of the structure of the Benzene molecule which originated in a daydream of a snake chasing its tail (which resembles a ring-shaped structure). 43In his popular book Imagine, Lehrer (2012) made a similar claim byassociating creativity with the color blue. Blue, which according to Lehrer is nearly automatically associated with the sky, encourages the mind to think in terms of infinite possibilities in accord with the vastness of the sky. 44I am referring here to the famous Einstein quote according to which neo-religious feelings seem to apply to the wonders of the human brain exploring an idea. This quote serves as a good example of the connection of creativity to the numinous: "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed…a knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms – it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man" (cited in Hareven, 2004, p. 23).
51 notethe prominence, in Hebrew as well as in English, of the metaphor of light emerging from darkness in regards to creativity,45 which corresponds with lively descriptions of secular or religious epiphanies. Still relating to psychological thought, albeit from a humanistic perspective, the idea of creativity as emotional investment,culminatingin the full realization of human potential, liberal humanism, and prime psychological health, of which self-expression is integral, is virtually synonymous withMaslow's (1971) famed concept of self- actualization. This concept marked a major step in the democratization of creativity by implying that anyone, given the right circumstances, can self-actualize. Referring to the small elite at the top of his hierarchical pyramid of needs whose happy and full lives are an example for anyone lower down the scale, Maslow famously stated that: "the concept of creativeness and the concept of the healthy self-actualizing fully human person may perhaps turn out to be the same thing" (1971, p.55).In a similar vein, creativity has been largely noted to be associated with various forms and expressions of "aliveness" in the most positive sense of the term: humor(Koestler, 1964), performances of spontaneity and vitality (Sawyer, 1998), and fun, pleasure, joy, and excitement (Adams, 1986; Mitchell, 1998). Creativity has, in addition,been singled out as a prime virtue in positive psychology (Peterson &Seligman, 2004) and central to optimal human experience, for example, in creativity researcher Csikszentmihalyi's (1996) famed concept of "flow," namely, the process of intense immersion in a slightly difficult task:"When we are involved in it [creativity], we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life" (cited in Nickerson, 1999, p. 400). There is a feeble and dark side to the positive psychology of creativity and its derivatives. Alongside joy, fun, and self-actualization from which others may benefit, dominance, arrogance, self-centeredness, and other forms of unkind behavior have also been positively associated with creative behavior (Feist, 1999; Ng, 2001). Similarly, violence has been regarded as related to creativity (Shechner, 1993), albeit from a more abstract perspective. From another angle, in cognitive studies for example, the concept of a "theory of mind" has been associated with both creativity and deception. This concept refers to the ability to attribute a full range of mental states to other individuals as well as oneself and then to use such attributions to predict and understand behavior. It has been designated one of human beings' most critical cognitive features. "Theory of mind" is a central constituent of what has been termed "social" and "Machiavellian" intelligence (Byrne &Whiten, 1988). It is interesting to note that among the behaviors depending on having a theory of mind (and in accordance with the idea of "Machiavellian intelligence"),intentionally deceiving others and pretending can be
45 Hebrew examples include: ra'ayon mavrik (brilliant idea), einayim borkot (sparkling eyes), hevzek ra'ayoni (flash of insight),lehatzig be'or aher (to put in a different light), he'ara (illumination), and the near universal use of a light bulb as the iconography of creativity.
52 found. The last one is of particular importance as it is, according to Mithen (1998), clearly linked to imagination and creative thinking.46
"God in man," Children, Childhood, and Creativity
As I mentioned in the delineation of the contours of the field and the presentation of my methodological journey in the previous chapter, as my fieldwork progressed, the pervasiveness of an emic child-related thematic unfolded. My informants constantly associated creativity with childhood, children, and play. Since I had, by then, perused a fair amount of the academic literature regarding creativity, it struck me that a discursive thread linking creativity, positiveness, and children was lacking. The research on creativity is filled with various types of references to children and childhood-related themes. Since most of these refer to creativity, teaching, nurturing and preservation, they can be understood as possessing a positive intrinsic valence. However, these themes weren't directly mentioned in texts that address the promoters of creativity's positiveness. Since this issue is of prime importance in the ensuing ethnographic chapters, especially in Chapter 3's discussion ofthe public perception of creativity, it is important to review some of the basic academic literature relating creativity to children from which the indirect discursive link between creativity, children, and positiveness derives. This connection is manifested in two principal inclinations: The first refers to the assertion that creativity is present in greater quantity among children and decreases over time as the child is subjected to more and more disciplined enculturation. During my ethnographic fieldwork, many of my informants bemoaned the destruction of creativity in and by the educational system.47 Some often referred to a well-known longitudinal experiment initiated by Land in 1968 in which he administered a creativity test to children aged three to five, retesting the same children at the ages of 10 and 15. The results, according towhich 98% of five year olds received a high score in contrast to30% of 10 year olds, 12% of 15 year olds, and only 2% of adults, led Land to the conclusion that non-creative behavior is learned (Land &Jarman, 1992).48In the abovementioned terms of little and big "c" creativity, adults transform "Creative" children into "creative" adults. Land's shocking results resonate in three ways. First, creativity as a precious and fragile characteristic seems to belong more to children than to adults. Second,the results highlight the importance attributed to the pedagogy of creativity as a tool that should be nurtured or taught to both adults and children.Thirdand
46Some of the evidence ofthis is based on research among autistic children whose lack of theory of mind, which impairs their abilities to socialize and communicate, also seems to inhibit their imagination (Baron-Cohen, 1995). 47This issue can be considered a global US-sourced worry. In July 2010, Newsweek magazine published an influential article entitled "The Creativity Crisis" addressing the ongoing decline of American children's scores in creativity tests (Bronson & Merryman, 2010). 48This view has been particularly popularized in the field by two celebrated TED talks: see especially Land's (2011) The Failure of Successand Robinson's (2006) Do Schools Kill Creativity?
53 a combination of the first twopoints, the results indicate the ethical emphasis placedby various theoreticians on the awareness of the potential destructiveness of the educational system, often eager to unfairly undermine and downplay imagination and uniqueness or force conformist "correct answers" (Cropley, 2010b; Lubart, 1999;Westby & Dawson, 1995). The second inclination relates to the assertion that certain qualities, namely play and playfulness, are prerequisites for creativity and insinuate a closer association with children than with adults.49Play's "unserious" property, in contrast to the more serious character of other social activities (Handelman, 1977),suits the distancing of play from the realm of adults to that of child-related frivolity. In some areas of Western culture, "playfulness is for children only" (Adams, 1986, p. 31) or is bracketed from the serious categories of daily life (i.e., work) to the leisure activities of weekends. From another standpoint, it has been argued that play reaches back not only to the very beginnings of humancultural performance but also to human animal origins (see Bateson & Martin, 2013), sharing with them the propensity for play in youth (Lewis, 2008). As such, play is critical both ontogenetically (i.e., central to human evolution, that is, the infancy of mankind) and phylogenetically (i.e., central to a child's development) with the child's creativity linked to later creativity (Russ, 2013). Both Piaget and Vygotsky, while distinguishing the child's imaginative play (embedded in misunderstandings or partial understandings of reality) from the problem-solving creativity of adults, nevertheless asserted that play can itself be a source of creative imagination and identified pretend play as its earliest source (Dansky, 1999). Referring to the resemblance in the creativity of the adult and the child, Freud (1908/1959), in a seminal text concerning creative writers, pointed out that children engaged in play and creative writers share the same process of entering a world of daydreaming and fantasy.Several researchers, however, have offered a more cautious approach and contested an overly radiant and facile connection of creativity to children and childhood. Some organizational studies have argued in favor of a lack of correlation between age and creativity (Binnewies, Ohly, & Niessen, 2008; Shearring, 1992). Capps (2012) defined creativity not as something which is lost but rather expressed differently, as he referred to aging as a creative process, manifested through changes brought on by loss and by the creative adaptation needed to cope with that loss. However, such references are few and far between, and the accentuated discursive link between children and creativity withstands its critics. On a darker note, and referring back to the historical Satanic forces, children represented the sexual union of deities (i.e., demons) and humans. Western identification of the demonic with the erotic is a prominent theme within Western demonologies which
49The ability to play does not exclude adults, but there is a noted tendency to attribute to adults a more structured and organized kind of play as opposed to unstructured or spontaneousplay(see Caillois, 1961; Huizinga,1955). Furthermore, play of the adult kind embodies the ability to comment on and contest social rules and normativity.This issue is explored in depth in Chapter 3.
54 relate to the sexual intercourse between the Devil and a woman resulting in the birth of the antichrist and,subsequently, the suspicious view of children as possible agents of Satanism (Westermann, 1994). However, children are also angelic, and the childantichrist stands in stark (and weak) opposition to the iconographies of baby Jesus and Moses in the basket. The historical timeframe during which Satanism weakened was also accompanied by changes in the perception of childhood. According to Ariès (1960), the category of childhood is relatively recent; it is only sincethe fifteenth centurythat children gradually came to be seen as delicate "small adults" entitled to protection, care, and love. This Western and somewhat Korczakian view of the child as delicate, pure, and innocent is culturally altered yet reflected in some of the religiously-inspired rationalizations of parents relating to high infant mortality rate in Brazil in Scheper- Hughes' (1992) famous work. In her research, deceased children's immediate access to heaven is infused with innocence and purity (such as their willingness to self-sacrifice) and stems from qualities they, if living,were bound to have lostlater, as they moved further away from their unadulterated state into the world of sin. Similarly, the idealization of children's creativity that emanates primarily from Land's research but also from those mentioned above regarding play implies that children naturally possess what adults have lost and must recover or recreate. As such, their portrayal approximates popular celestial Judeo-Christian portrayals of angelic children in their accessibility to "angelic" creativity. To the extent that creativity and heaven are similar, children can be considered "little angels of creativity." Childlikeness is therefore a promoter of positiveness and in its construal belongs to the "God-in-man" root metaphor. In conclusion, creativity, despite its contemporary secularized conceptualization and a certain connection to the creativity of Satanic forces,remains a highly theologically romanticized concept. It continues to entertain links to spirituality and derives much of its positiveness from its association with art, higher paths of existence (also in the de-theologized form), the mysterious phenomenologies of transcendence embodied in the frenzied inspiration of peak experiences, liminality, spirituality, childlikeness, and play. The process of secularization in which creative power is passed from "God" to "man" is not absolute In other words, the positive exaltation of artistic expression, the mysteriousness of only partially accessible infinite depths, non-rational phenomenologies of spontaneous creativity and self-actualization, purity, and innocence all remain an inherent part of popular perception and of academic research oncreativity.
55
Part 2: The Human Condition
Creativity, Modernism, and Capitalism Creativity, as a preoccupation of contemporary times, is intricately associated with modernism as both a tool and the goal of technological progress and economic prosperity. Within such a cosmology, creative technologies are celebrated as pinnacles of human progress oriented toward utopian futures. Furthermore, creativity as a personal attribute is being acknowledged and encouraged in the digital information workplace of post-industrialist society. Historically, the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason, rational science, and interest in the practical uses of creativity, served as the precursor to Modernism, which, in the context of creativity, is crucially intertwined with capitalism. Under its influence, the transition from "God" to "man" continued through Darwinian thought, which postulated that the occurrence of the "new" was merely adaptive survival mechanisms or natural permutations favored by the dialectic between chance and necessity (Ingold, 1986), and through Galton's 1869 book,Hereditary Genius, which offered a pivotal reformulation of creativityas not only essentialist and elitist but also measurable. As such, it laid the foundation for the modern, scientific, and positivistic paradigm of creativity research (Albert & Runco, 1999). Galton planted human exceptionality in human biology and established creativity as noteworthy only to the extent that it belongs to eminent creative manifestations located in the highest echelons of artistic endeavors and scientific discoveries (Simonton, 2003). This paradigm's influence can be found in the psychometric tradition, similar to intelligence testing, in creativity evaluation (Sternberg & O'Hara, 1999)andin the role of statistical data in enframing and representingcreativity (Christophers, 2007).Instruments of evaluation and enframing are, of course, distinctively symptomatic of a positive quest to harness the forces of human creativity. Much of these forces haveultimately, been directed toward the efforts of accumulating capital. Capitalism, as Deleuze and Guattari (1972) remarked, is a never- ending quest to fill an eternal void vianew consumable objects of fascination and desire.Consequently, as mentioned in Chapter 1, the most salient interpretation of creativity in Western cultures is a product-oriented one, synonymous with innovation and best expressed in the widespread definition of creativity as the production of something which is both "novel" and "useful" and evaluated as beneficial. To the extent that it is not disruptive, creativity thusdefined is closely associated with problem-solving (Hughes-Freeland, 2007).The inclination toward a modernist-capitalist reading of creativity (as well as its criticism) has also marked anthropological literature, not only as a taken-for-granted definition but also as an acknowledgement of the historical and
56 cultural context in which the concept has evolved. Historically, Liep (2001) located the roots of creativity's popularity in the rise of modernity, itself inextricably linkedwith capitalism. The rise of a class of free entrepreneurs valuing risk-taking and innovation, along with the Enlightenment's ideas of liberation from l'ancien régime and Romanticism's emphasis on personal fulfillment, were the cultural agents in the fashioning of this fascination. For better and for worse, with the emergence of modernity,scientists, artists, and capitalist entrepreneurs found themselves in the same boat, sailing throughthe tumultuous waves of market competition where, in order to stand out from other competitors, creativity was paramount. In the global commodity market, the unquenchable thirst for the "new" drives creativity forward as a desired means to achieve and enhance personal and/or social economic prosperity, relying on a knowledge-based economy as well as individual well- being (Löfgren, 2001). For example, the influential urban studies theorist Florida (2002) defined the core of his "creative class" to include, "people in science and engineering, architecture and design, education, arts, music and entertainment, whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology and/or new creative content" (p.5). He identified around30 percent of the work force in the United States as belonging to this category –the driving force behind the immense US economic power and growth. On the other side of the Atlantic, as mentioned in Chapter 1, the year 2009 was designated the European Year of Creativity and Innovation. The terms creativity and innovation were both linked to the improvement inquality of life and the provision of answers to Europe's recent economic crisis. Sternberg and Lubart (1999) commented that many CEOs are selected for their creative visionof how to turn a company around.Likewise,phrases such as "creative salesman," "creative education," and "'courses in creative writing," which first appeared in the 1930s (Pope, 2005), persist today, as much of the self-improvement, New-Age-inspired, and academic-yet- accessible (i.e., popular science) literature on the fostering of creativity seems to originate in and be directed toward the field of entrepreneurial innovation and management studies.50 Within such a patently capitalist cosmology, the entrepreneur is a cultural hero, an agent of technological and creative betterment. The single most described characteristic of entrepreneurs is creativity, defined as"the ability to see things differently, to see a product that is not currently available but would be viewed positively by consumers (McDaniel, 2002, p. 70). Creativity, in this sense, is closely linked to commercial innovation.51 The ethos of entrepreneurial activity, specifically in the high-
50Significant and widely read (in the field) contributions include Seelig's Ingenious (2012 ),Robinson'sOut of Our Minds (2011), Kelley and Kelley's Creative Confidence (2013) and Lehrer's Imagine (2012). 51 Kirby (2003) disagreed with Schumpeter who historically saw the two faculties as a single process and innovation as the sole domain of the entrepreneur. Instead, he defined creativity as the ability to come up with an idea and innovation as the subsequent implementation of that thought (creativity=think, innovation=do). Both interpretations can be found in the field.
57 tech sector, is also evidentin present-day theoretical formulations of capitalism, namely Boltanski and Chiapello's (2005) term "project-oriented cité," which is described as, "a new, contemporary justificatory regime of capitalism, centered on computer information technologies which highly values adaptability, flexibility, polyvalence, autonomous work, a variety of personal contacts and above all, the constant pursuit of some sort of activity (p.169). In a context that values the harnessing of science and technology primarily for the needs of capitalism, the modern state, and its entrepreneurial activity, technological progress denotes human progress, which becomes positive in and of itself (Fisher, 2010). Technology is thereby shaped as benevolent (Robins& Webster, 1999) and capable of answering any problem, and technological discourse plays a central role in the legitimation of a techno-political order (Fisher, 2010).This techno-political order is alluring; as Montuori (2010) noted, creativity has its place in the collective envisioning and shaping of desirable futures. The category of "new," which the entrepreneur promotes, denotes being future-oriented and following a linear course of ever- improving technological proficiency. Modernist influences can be detected in the feelings of awe at the ingenuity embodied in new technologies celebrated and admired in the public sphere (Mosco, 2004) and in the terms according towhich the future of creative technologies are being fantasized.In fullaccordance with progress narratives, contemporary times are seeing a resurgence of past fascinations withthe body as a machine in the guise of genetics, bio-engineering, and artificial intelligence and life. Some of these fascinations, like the recreation of the body through cosmetic surgery, are heavily related to the economics of capitalist consumerism and are articulated through a notionally democratic politics of individual freedom (Bordo, 1993), while others focus on the promise of transhumanist technologies that will, in the nearfuture,enable us to defy human mortality.52 Several writers have noted that creativity is seen as a propelling feature of (new) capitalism in terms of products just as much as it is (perhaps ironically) perceived as a remedy for the social malaises associated with capitalism andother predicaments relating to the postmodern condition. Löfgren (2001) noted creativity's compensatory ring, remarking on its capacity to provide, deepen, and enrich a colorful, unique, and distinct existence. His view echoes philosophers like Nietzsche and Tsanoff who statedthat creativity consoles man in a largely pathetic and nihilistic world (McLaren, 1983). Similarly, creativity is of relevance and growing importance in postmodern times as well. First, creativity finds expression in the idea of the constant discovery, creation,
52In this respect particularly, the Singularity movement, mostly identified with futurist and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil and best known for its claimthat immortality will be within reach in several decades (see Kurzweil &Grossman, 2004), deserves special mention, as it is extremelypopular among the geek sector. This issue has recently been popularized in Israel by historian Harari in his best-selling book Sapiens (2014),in which he speculated that the future of human species lies in transhumanist immortality (specifically, at least in its early stages, wealthy elites), while noting that the forces taking on this ambitious challenge lie in the multinational corporations headquartered in Silicon Valley.
58 and recreation of the self (that is, "being true to yourself" on the one hand, and "reinventing yourself" on the other) and its environment, while the disintegration of the hierarchy and segregation of cultural spheres results in a multitude of cross-fertilizing creative encounters (Liep, 2001; Löfgren, 2001). Second, in a world increasingly characterized by constant change, astutely articulated by Sardar (2010) as "post-normal times," the concept of creativity has a role as an anxiety buffer, an answer to a general sense of unpreparedness (Runco, 2004), and creative technologies especially become tools for flexibility, adaptability, and reactivity (Fisher, 2010). Consequently, creativity seems to be a slogan for success, a prime vehicle/promoter of prosperity to be implemented and applied in organizations and various educational and business settings in whichitfinds its place not solely in the guise of fascinating products, such as the technological gadgets and engineering feats celebrated as pinnacles of human spirit,but also as a playful process (Fisher, 2010). Fisher noted that technology discourse in post- Fordism responds to the humanist critique withregards to the oppressive nature of Fordism and the hindering of personal freedom and creativity by enhancing individual (but not social) emancipation through the alleviation of alienation.Work is reconceptualized as the eroticized and playful activity of production and consumption, involving the workers' personal qualities of creativity, deep engagement, interactivity, and interpersonal communication and thus associating, in particular, the "God in man" root metaphor with the high-tech workplace. From a critical perspective that relates to this study's focal point of interest, this tendency could also be analyzed as an attempt byprofit-making endeavors to capitalize on creativity's aura in order to redefine work through a false consciousness of "fun." Personal pleasure would indeed be achieved but not social emancipation or justice. A similar view is expressed by Mrnarević (2011), who deplored the shifting of the value of creativity from its traditional, humanistic interpretation as "a good thing" to its role in theprofit and consumer-driven doctrines of present-day capitalist industries. This state merely reinforces the gap between the privileged minority (who possess the means to still construe such creativity as benevolent) and the voiceless, impoverished majority. Mrnarević argued that all benevolent definitions of creativity are vulnerable to an insidious and market-based reconceptualization. The dark side of creativity relating to modernism and capitalism is by and large most prevalent. Liep (2001) noted the contradiction between the celebration of creativity as the spark of modernity'sincessant innovation and the disturbing uses it may be and has been put to. While acknowledging that creative ideas have been at the service of maleficent seduction and nefarious ideologies, Liep stressed that the growth of the forces of production has brought forth destructive forces and pollution. Indeed, aside from the pollution of natural resources,the association between the dark side of creativity, modernity, and capitalism, can be found in industrial domains with creativity
59 linked to military-industrial complexes. The Second World War (with the particularly repellent technological creativity of the Nazi mass genocide) and the Cold War areof particular importance here (Cropley, 2010; Dunbar, 1999; Törnqvist, 2004). At least froman American-centric perspective, Törnqvist (2004) observedthat the great breakthrough in science came during the Second World War, as significant portions of the scientific and technical capacity of the warring countries were engaged in the war effort. The US Manhattan Project task of creating an atomic bomb was the largest-scale example of its timeof close cooperation between the war industry and research. The Cold War years were also beneficial to the cooperation between military industry and research in both the United Statesand Europe.53Cropley (2010) suggestedthat the space race between the United States and the Former Soviet Union was crucialfor promoting the modernist-capitalist reading of creativity supported by an (essentially psychometric) paradigm of research on creativity. Specifically, Cropley (2010) claimed that the "Sputnik shock" in 1957 shaped modern interest in creativity as an interest in "functional creativity" (i.e., creativity that results in the production of functionally viable products):
The focus of thinking was not traditional aesthetic questions of truth and beauty but pragmatic issues of how to promote national welfare through production of useful machines, tools, technological devices, appliances, production and distribution systems, and so on (regrettably, especially weapons). (p. 342) The academic tendency to ignore the dark side of creativity shifted considerably in the West at the beginning of the twenty-first century in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, forcing the formulation of both benevolent and malevolent definitions of creativity. In an article devoted mainly to terrorism and crime, Cropley, Kaufman, and Cropley (2008) mentioned that both Bacon and Descartes saw scientific creativity as involving the harnessing of the forces of nature for the betterment of the human condition. They defined benevolent creativity as creativity directed towards what most civilized people would regard as appropriate, ethical, or desirable purposes, with reference to artistic, business, and design-related endeavors.They also presented the concepts of negative and malevolent creativity.Negative creativity was describedas "unintended harm (such as creatively avoiding work thus creating more work for someone else) or unintended consequences of otherwise positive efforts (such as the understanding of germ mechanism of disease which may lead to germ warfare) and malevolent creativity, was described as "creativity that is deliberately planned to damage others." (p. 106). In the first and, to date, only volume on the topic entitled The Dark Side of Creativity (Cropley, Cropley, Kaufman,& Runco,2010), terrorism and crime (and the possible ways to combat them) are the topic of many of the essaysalongside other issues which were of only
53Razik (1970) observed that the Cold War also contributed to the democratization process of the concept of creativity and its reassuring properties. In the face of Soviet threat, creativity could no longer remainmysterious, untouchable, and exclusive.
60 limited interest prior to the 9/11 attacks. These include the destructive powers of technology, the collision course between the creative individual and the more conservative society in which the violence society imposes on the individual is designated as a dark side of creativity, and the link between the challenges of mental health and the creative process in which the suffering of the individual who isblessed and cursed by both lies in creativity's dark side. In conclusion, modernism and capitalism, whileproviding the most widespread and self-evident definition of creativity (i.e., innovation –a functional, novel, adaptive, and marketable product), have catapulted the concept to cultural superstardom endowed with a positive aura as the prime means of achieving financial success. Technological progress with its vision of approachable futuristic utopias thus accompanies an idealization of entrepreneurial practices and the idea of an objective and positivistic statistics-based practice of creativity evaluation and enhancement.
Struggle, Agency, and Resistance
"A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill" (Robert Heinlein)
As power, in the Foucauldian sense of the term, is deeply embedded in social structure and manifested in all social relations and discourses (Foucault, 1980,1982), I use the terms struggle, agency, and resistance here as broad concepts, encompassing the celebration of human agency in various forms. First, they refer to the basic human capacity for creativity as emphasized by the anthropologists reviewed in Chapter 1. Second they refer to the creative response of individuals and various collectives and marginal groups to constraints, suffering, social isolation, persecution, coercion, and institutional control as well as personal hardships. For anthropologists, who feel a natural solidarity with people at a grassroots level (Löfgren, 2001), creativity derives its positiveness from a basic empathy toward the human vitality and agency enacted in practices of resistance. Other disciplinescelebrate struggle, resistance, and agency by emphasizing non-conformity, boundary disruption, hybridity, and other similar traits as inherent to the psychological makeup of creative individuals and of various creative endeavors. Creativity is often seen as synonymous with freedom and the struggle against repressive forces (Mitchell, 1998). Nickerson (1999) noted the heavy cultural encoding of creative thinking with values of freedom:"daring, uninhibited, fanciful, imaginative, free-spirited, unpredictable and revolutionary" (p.374). This general tendency is especially noticeable in art which has been connected with freedom from restraint (Firth, 1992). In its free-spiritedness, creativity has even been perceived as a contrast to critical
61 thinking.54 Fernandez (2001), from a more complex standpoint, stated that creativity's modus operandi is of a fundamentally negentropic nature (i.e.,it leans toward order), implying that creativity's existence, to the extent that it is to be intelligible rather than random or idiosyncratic, entails the presence of constraints. Whether constraints are a precondition or an impediment to creativity (or both), the positive dimensions of freedom and confronting coercion have been associated with creativity through the positioning of creative individuals on a collision course with their more conservative society. These positive dimensions highlight creativity as a politically-charged actionand point out the subsequent importance of social gadflies and creative forerunners to scientific, artistic, and cultural breakthroughs and progress. These are the bright side of this root metaphor;the confrontation and the suffering it inflicts upon the creative person constitutes its dark side. Connected tothe aforementioned importance of liminality, anthropological thought has recognized that a certain disconnection from society seems to be a requisite for creativity, since the anti-structural, liminal phase of the ritual provides the necessary social freedom and disconnection from the binds of societal structure needed to transcend established paradigms of thought (Hodder, 1998; Rudwick, 1996). This social position of the creative individual and action is historically indebted to Romanticism which, besides emphasizing emotions as a prime creative faculty, initiated the prevailing cultural myth of the lone genius(Montuori&Purser, 1995).55The Romantics' depiction of creative personas as special individuals whose work set them apart or above the masses andwhose romanticized externally imposed or self-imposed exclusion and isolation from society is an imperative to or synonymous with genius is the reductionist image of creativity that still prevails in popular imagination today. This outcome of the confrontation between creative individual, mind, and action and societywassummarized by Brower (1999):
There is a central problem for the creative mind, which is an essential tension between creativity and conformity. Conformity is doing things as others do and have done. On the other hand, creativity is doing things in a novel way as well as breaking out of established patterns. As a result of this break, the creator is frequently seen by society as a rebel, a deviant, and a gadfly. Creativity and deviance are in many ways synonymous. The creator must rebel against, contradict, and negate established ways of thinking. New ideas are met with
54In his introduction to Part IV of Creativity and Cultural Improvisation dealing with the creativity of anthropological scholarship, Harris (2007) began with an anecdote about a conference in which one of the panelists remarked that "research is almost the opposite of creativity." Harris noted that no one in the audience, himself included, challenged the comment.
55The genius was seen as a loner both socially andpersonally.Policastro and Gardner(1999), for example, suggested that eminently creative people areloners with troubled personal relationships who prefer their own company to that of others.
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societal repression. It takes time for culture to accommodate to the unfamiliar. (p. 6)
By threatening established moral orders, creative people (and their ideas) have been documented and described as persecuted and sometimes imprisoned (Brower, 1999), anxious to live in politically tolerant climates (Florida, 2002),56and characterized by various degrees of contrarianist personality traits (Feist, 1999).If creativity is to be examined through the capitalist and economically liberal perspective, this ethos of contrarianism can also be seenin entrepreneurship. McDaniel (2002) highlighted the Schumpeterian emphasison the desequilibrating nature of entrepreneurship by entrepreneurs who implementnew combinations of modes of production through innovation and do things differently as a result of their creative vision. Entrepreneurship is a source of change and of rendering old markets and modes of production obsolete; an action appropriately termed "creative destruction."57 From a related angle, Kirby (2003) depicted creative entrepreneurs as risk-takers,58 whose willingness to change existing orders both influences the future and is influenced by their vision of it, often causing themto be labeled social deviants59due to their involvement in challenging some of a community's basic values. In their unwillingness to follow rules and procedures, entrepreneursare thereby counterposed totheir Janus-faced twin of (neo) liberal capitalist democracy, the Weberian bureaucrat. From a psychological standpoint, ample research has addressed the personal suffering of eminently creative individuals afflicted by external hardships or mental disorders (Averill &Nunley, 2010; Durrenberger, 1999;Jamison, 1996; Policastro&Gardner, 1999; Pope, 2005; Simonton, 2010; Storr, 1972; Therivel, 1999),allimplying these to be prerequisites for creative achievements that have further contributed to the construction of the creative individual's deviation from healthy norms. Furthermore, some of the psychological makeup of creative individuals mentioned in psychological research corresponds tothe character of anthropological postmodern theorizing that responded to earlier structuralist and other philosophical inquiries emphasizing the human propensity of constructing ethnic, racial, and other boundaries (Bhabha, 1994). Anthropologists have noted that creativity is somewhat linked to hybridity, as both relate to cross-cultural confrontations, creolization processes, and
56This explains the thriving technological innovation scene in the San Francisco Bay area.Florida (2002) attributed the strong presence of gay communities in creative urban agglomerations to the leaning of both gays and members of the creative class to live in politically tolerant environments. Early research on creativity also mentioned that creativity thrives in supportive environments (Eyring, 1959). 57 The idea of "creative destruction" was reframed in Christensen's (1997) more recent terminology as "disruptive innovation," an oft-cited term in the field. 58The French origin of entrepreneur, the verb entreprendre(coined by Richard Cantillon around 1730), acknowledges risk taking as the prime faculty of entrepreneurship. 59Kirby (2003) mentioned several characteristics of entrepreneurs in this respect: self-esteem, determination (to finish a task), persistence, willingness (and ability) to take risks, optimism, creativity (ability to see a need and end result), focus (on a goal), foresight, ability to learn from mistakes and not accept failures, and responsibility (for the results).
63 center-periphery cross-pollination (Archetti, 2001; Hannerz, 1996). Similar to the shifting of border zones and the blurring of distinctions and categorizations characteristic of cultural creative hybridity, the psychological constitution of the creative individual seems to share a central feature of boundary-crossing. Research in the field of psychology has pointed out that the essence of individual creativity lies within the ability to transgress and oppose categorizations and boundaries or to reconcile oppositions, thus implying abilities absent among individuals characterized by "little c" creativity (rather than more "Creative" individuals), who are more inclined toward stability and boundary-making. Creative individuals have generally been associated with traits such as contrarianism, norm-doubting, openness to experience, and moral ambiguity (Feist, 1999)60 and have specifically been perceived as attracted to complexity (Mialaret, 1994), possessing a tolerance for – or attraction to – themes relating to ambivalence (Sawyer, 1998) and an ability to tolerate conflict (Sheldon, 1995). Feist (1999) suggested that the creative genius may be both more naive and more knowledgeable than the average person. Perhaps the most convincing argument in this respect is creativity's association with the phenomenon of psychological androgyny. This refers to the extent to which a person crosses sex-typed standards of either masculine or feminine desirable behaviour (Norlander & Erixon, 2000; Weinstein & Bobko, 1980). This dichotomous model that pits the creative individual against society has nevertheless been subjected to intense criticism and described as romanticized, reductionist, and generally untrue to the practical reality and the frequently disorderly and collaborative nature of creative processes. This view of creativity undermines the role of craft and technique as well as the value of tradition (which most often plays an antagonistic role in narratives of creativity) for informing creative acts, both acquired over longperiods of time (Kristeller, 1983). Refuting creatio ex-nihilo paradigms, Nickles (1994) argued that novel discoveries do not come in a single flash but rather in a series of perceptive episodes. Critical stances informed by systemic approaches to creativity highlight creativity as negotiated by the interconnectivity of the individual, a domain of knowledge, and a social system (Csikszentmihalyi, 1999; Glăveanu, 2009). These are evident in theoretical assertions that creativity and discoveries embody a process of negotiation interrelated with social fields that judge and assess (Schaffer,1994). They are also manifested in the suggestion that creativity has no strong- willed initiating human agency but is rather a response to a dialectic between chance and necessity (Ingold, 1996) or a coupling of chance and insight embodied in the concept of serendipity (Fine &Deegan, 1996). These critical stances move away from merely relegating to the creative individual's social environment the task of being supportive or
60Feist(1999) further mentioned an inclination toward fantasy and imagination, rebellious nonconforming dispositions, impulsiveness, a lack of conscientiousness, anxiety, emotional sensitivity, tyranny, norm-doubting, nonconformity, dependence, drive and ambition, dominance, arrogance, hostility, and self-confidence.
64 unsupportive, accepting or intolerant of creativity. Rather, they demonstrate that innovation emerges not solely from the individual but from webs of alliances (Akrich,Callon, & Latour, 2002)61 and cross-pollinating encounters or interactive heterogeneity in social systems (Montuori & Purser, 1995; Törnqvist, 2004). What may appear as novelty could merely be transformations, variations, or combinations of existing elements and relations (Friedman, 2001) or, in Pope's (2005) terms, "in-ter- ventions" rather than "inventions," referring to interventions in an existing state of affairs as people mostly work in intended or unintended collaborations. Moeran (2014) coined the term "ensemblages" to refer to such collaborative processes in the fashioning of creative cultural items. These intended collaborations, especially in the business sector, haverecently been gaining popularity in the guise of terms such as "open innovation" (Chesbrough, 2003), "open creativity" (Steiner, 2009), or "we-paradigms" (Glăveanu, 2010), which, acknowledging that knowledge is no longer concentrated in a few large organizations, promote decentralized, willfully collaborative, and boundary-defying models of cooperation between individuals and companies. The most prominent example of such collaboration is the increasingly popular open-source software –software which is distributed freely to anyone for any purpose, resulting in further collaborative development, improvement, and commercial attractiveness due to thelarge number of users.In Coleman's ethnography of hacking, Coding Freedom (2013), she observed a positive reformulation of the ethics and aesthetics of hacking in which the culture of free software is a prime example. Since the software is free, hacking loses its original meaningof stealing and instead reflects values of liberty, liberalism, and freedom,the right to learn and access knowledge, protection of free speech and civil liberties, promotion of individual autonomy and tolerance, rule through limited government and universal law, and commitment to equal opportunity and meritocracy. Coleman contended that present-day hackers and developers of freesoftware (as many of my informants in the geek community referred to themselves) embody these values and ideals. This shift in specialized domains of creativity (from private to collaborative)and in the moral valence previously attached to it further endows the concept with a fraternal and democratic aura of positiveness alongside the cultural concept of the lone creative individual. Furthermore, Montuori and Purser (1995) attributed the interpretation of creativity that overlooks its collaborative and collectivistic aspects to both the fact that most creativity researchers are psychologists who focus on individual human beings and the close ties between this interpretation and American hyper-individualism. These critiques concur with postmodern approaches that deconstruct the presumption of
61These do not refer necessarily to alliances between innovators but indicate collaborations of a more interdisciplinary nature such as between innovators and the people involved in publicizing.
65 originality and the illusion of the creative subject's autonomy (Brown, 1999) and the historical analyses which hold that accounts of several creative discoveries byindividuals who had not operated in isolation have been largely revised to present them as lone geniuses, cultural heroes of their time (Schaffer,1994).62Nevertheless, while these critical theoretical contributions make it clear that the concept of the lone genius in need of no education creating ex-nihilo isa cultural misconception, this myth or fetishism still prevails in the popular imagination and may even be harmful to creative individuals (Montuori&Purser, 1995). Generally speaking, creativity in anthropology gained importance as anthropologists began to emphasize the human capacity for change (Hastrup, 2001)or,more specifically, as anthropologists inclined towardidentifying creativity in the existence of the marginalized and the underdogs (Liep, 2001; Löfgren, 2001). I mentioned that Löfgren noticed that anthropological studies of creativity are often marked by a moral obligation to contribute to the empowerment of grassroots groups or to marginal social categories with which researchers feel a natural solidarity. In this respect, he wrote that,throughout the literature,creativity has gained several connotations and associations, serving as a counter-argument within certain domains of research; for example,in consumption studies, creativity and resistance were seen to ascribe agency and a more actor-oriented approach to consumers previously depicted as passive and mindless and now redefined as culture builders and bricoleurs. Elsewhere, the creativity of post-colonial subjects –workers, women, and teenagers – was highlighted, and creativity redefined as a gerund, synonymous with coping or alternative lifestyles. Such coping can be seen in the human capacity to escape and revitalize convention and the ability to subvert homogenizing influences of globalization (Fernandez, 2001) or engage in active resistance, the most recent example being the Arab Spring (Montuori, 2013). Furthermore, anthropologists have, to a certain extent, been consciously engaged in ascribing this analytical concept of change and resistance as a complementary feature to societies which have suffered from their portrayal as static and timeless (Drewal, 1988;Scheele, 2007) and, in addition,non-technologically proficient, if creativity is to be construed as synonymous with innovation within a capitalist cosmology. On the societal level, creativity is included in the resistive ethno-national self- image of many collectives. Only a small minority refer to themselves as not creative. For example, several Japanese scholars have claimed that the Japanese lack creativity and merely borrow from other cultures (Fraser-Low, 1989). On the other hand, as demonstrated in Chapter 1, many groups (among them Jews and Israelis) include human ingenuity in their folkloristic self-perceptions. Relating to creativity-as-products, for example, the Hindi term Jugaad,referring to innovative simple street mechanics in
62Schaffer (1994) noted that the revision of creative narratives has included not only the glorifications of individuals and creative processes but also a suppression of instances in which creative processes did not yield creative results, such as the neglect of autobiographies of reverie in which the reverie did not turn out to be noteworthy.
66 conditions of poverty, has recently gained popularity in the West, promoted as a way of thinking that enables people working in creative industries to "do more with less" (Radjou,Prabhu, & Ahuja,2012). The cultures mentioned in Chapter 1 refer less to products and more to themselves as either directly or indirectly creative,highlighting their ability to "make do" or "find a way" through cunning and ruse and attempting to establish their untameability in the face of occupation, re-education, persecution, and other externally-imposed hardships, sometimes with destructive results.63 In conclusion, creativity's liberated and resistive nature is deeply reflective of its various phenomenologies among both individuals and collectives. Informed by personal hardships and environmental and societal constraints, creativity is fundamentally positive in its association with freedom and open-mindedness. Its positiveness is also linked to the construction of the creative individual's (or collective's) exceptionality, having risen above and against the masses, mostly for the better but also for the worse in terms of personal costs. Finally, creativity is eminently positive through its celebration and glorification of human resistance, agency, and overcoming of persecution and hardship, both as a prerequisite to and a result of creativity.
Analysis and Theoretical Contributions: Différance, Positiveness from the Bottom-Up, and Questioning the Positive-Negative Dichotomy
Famed psychologist Rogers (1954) refrained in his seminal essayfrom attributing any moral valence, good or bad, to creativity, refusing to imbue what he perceived to be an objective definition of creativity with subjective terms.Thisopinion was subsequently reiterated and defended by Runco (2010). Creative malfeasance, with very few exceptions, has not only been generally neglected and under-discussed but sometimes even regarded as unworthy of being diagnosed as creativity at all. Cropley (1992), for instance, noted that: "The positive social value associated with the term creativity, along with the presence of an ethical element in education, make it repugnant to speak of the creativity of a cheat, a mass murderer or an evil demagogue" (p.49). In my methodological remark concerning "following the silence," I referred to similar opinions. However, I subsequently demonstrate that this stance can be understood in terms of the themes explored in this chapter. In my archeology of fragmented knowledge, I have contested any perception of creativity as an empty, floating, or neutral signifier (even Cropley's previous quote attests to its positive
63Here I am specifically referring to two studies, both conducted in Africa, which highlight the potential destructiveness of such creativity. In Uganda, Reynolds-Whyte (2001) depicted a creative, perversely counterproductive, illicit, and medically mistaken consumption of pharmaceuticals by informants celebrating their ability to "always find a way" in order to bypass rules and regulations. In Nigeria, Smith (2001) and Glickman (2005) conducted studies relating to the infamous "Nigerian scam," namely, the fantasies of fast wealth which, in some cases, even involves ritual killings. Although this type of scam has counterparts in the West, it is so prevalent in Nigeria that former Secretary of State Colin Powell called the Nigerians "a nation of scammers."
67 value).Using studies from philosophy, theology, psychology, post-Marxist sociology,and anthropology, I have shown that creativity's positive morality has been constructed and compartmentalized;the concept of creativity was fashioned by sampling from a fragmented whole several important themes in Western culture and research, crystallized as creativity and then posited as opposed to another set of absent constructs which might have been but weren't equally considered as creative. The writing of and about positiveness increativity (including references to it in this text) includes the repression of negativity and is, essentially, only one offering in a polysemic metaphorical auction. In the terms of différance, the differential moral character and temporal deference between the pair of opposites on which discourse is constructed is evident in all root metaphors. Creativity entails a certain polysemia (but not dissemination whichis uncontrolled) in which the act of creating knowledge consistently engenders a preference toward a somewhat self-evident "truth" of creativity. In "God-in- man,"creativity referred to God and the innocent angel-child as well as to a morally desirable and transcendental artistic force with a lingering scent of an instar dei quality, which translates in secular terms as interdependent or even synonymous with self- actualization in humanistic psychology. In "modernism and capitalism,"creativity referred to the social and individual economic prosperity that creativity may bring, especially when interpreted within a modernist-capitalist cosmology, as an epitome of betterment in all its related fields."Struggle, agency, and resistance"referred to the juxtaposition of creativity with ethical dimensions of positiveness as they relate to human struggle, agency and resistance, with creativity seen as the weapon of the underdog, a present-day cultural hero. All of these are opposed in their positively constructed "nature" to a polysemia of other no less creative options (it would be difficult to undermine the creativity of Satanic forces or of a powerful elite). However, they are also subjected to the repressive act of writing,that is, the effect of observation through instruments and technologies of observation of these cultural strands.Although creativity is predominantly positive, a mild awareness of creativity's dark side has accompanied these three major root metaphors. However, this awareness as well as the cultural trends and research to which it refers create a differential temporality. The positive is written as preceding the negative both temporally and subserviently (pollution comes after progress, Satan accentuates the power of God who already existed). Alternately, to the extent that they are presented together (the underdog's suffering and genius), they are soon separated in favor of the present presence of the positive, as the negative is relegated to a past-present state that is defined by its absence (the creatively victorious underdog no longer suffers). They each require the other's absence and relegate it to a past that has never been present, cannot be present, nor never will be present. Even in the critical academic literature,
68 theoretical formulations relating to the dark side of creativity appeared relatively late (inspired by the 9/11 attacks), and while dark sides to each of the three major impetuses that promote creativity's positiveness can indeed be detected prior to that tragedy (that is, in a certain plurality of moral meanings), they are incomparable to the breadth of academic and popular literature depicting creativity as desirable and beneficial. Following 9/11, the positive-negative creativity dialectic has been largely dedicated to the more predictable route of pointing out creative malfeasance destined to redress an imbalance in a seemingly dichotomous model. The aforementioned definitions of negative and malevolent creativityillustrate a trajectory that implies an agency guiding a disconnection of creativity from an original positive or a fundamentally neutral use, followed by a harnessing of creative products (such as an aircraft in the case of the 9/11 attacks) or processes and talents,and then redirected toward negative ends. Furthermore,thefocus on provocative and incendiary topics,such as terrorism and crime, compartmentalizes malevolent symbolic encoding in a conceptual "space of death" (Taussig, 1987), which unintentionally and ironically enablesa positive aspect to emerge intact from the intended critique of creativity. In these theoretical definitions, the whole is truly abandoned, as the positive disconnects from the negative at three discursive junctions, and in the aftermath of a dark discussion about malevolent creativity, "benevolent" or "inoffensive" are not required to be added in front of "creativity" for it to be (still) perceived as such. The overarching Derridean thought in this chapter is useful for addressing the contributions of theensuingethnographic chapters. Indeed, the différance between the positive and the negative is mirrored in the ethnography,since the dark side of creativity is largely absent from the public sphere, but some aspects of negative creativity are expressed privately and malevolence isn't referred to at all. As mentioned inChapter 1, I chose to focus this research on an exploration of thelight-positive-present side of creativity and, by extension, to probe the shadows– the possible negative ramifications of positiveness and the dark-negative-absent side–based on these theoretical understandings. Specifically,as a result of the ethnographic methodology that guides this study, this dissertation offers twotypes of contributions to the academic debates on positive and negative creativity,both using the Derridean critique of traditional philosophy to emphasizethe constant interplay of differences, similarities, and interrelations. First, while most approaches toward the positiveness ofcreativity are largelyconstructivist and based on generalized, homogenized, and static interpretations of the concept's cultural history, my focus is an ethnographically-informed exploration. In other words, the traditional approaches are, to a great extent, top-down, and they thus partake in the construction of an absolute and even somewhat anemic form of knowledge. A bottom-up ethnographic examination of how people work with creativity
69 entails, by definition,an interplay of meaning production in which top-down constituents converse with one another. They are embedded within social and cultural understandings. Chapter 3enlivens this chapter's conclusions ethnographically and portrays the phenomenology, ontology, and epistemology of creativity, namely,how people work, talk, and feel creativity's positiveness as an inherent and forceful truth insofar as the Jewish-Israeli national context is concerned. Second, Derrida's ideas on interplay in meaning production as connected tothe separation of opposites or objects from their plurality concur with the denouncing of the static elegance of cultural portraits that has consistently characterized anthropological critique. Such a static elegance underlies the widespread conceptualization of benevolent/positive versus malevolent/negative creativity. This dissertation questions this separation by providing examples of the interplay between positive and negative categorizations of creativity.The fluidity, dynamism, and porosity of boundaries in any culture require acknowledgement of the interplay between darkness and light and the inherently dialectical or interactional nature of their relations. The present presence of positiveness may conjure up the absence of negativity, and by building on the practices and discourses that constitute creativity as intensely positive, I contest this theoretical separation of positive and negative and argue that across some themes in Jewish-Israeli national culture, positive and negative renditions of creativity not only occur simultaneously but actually feed off each other. The cultural generators of the reverential stance toward creativity (as positive) are also responsible for the warnings and negative interpretations given to creativity expressed by several of my informants, and the absence of negative creativity struggles to be acknowledged. In this respect, my treatment of creativity somewhat resembles the concept of negative creativity, which may be regarded as an unintended byproduct of positive creativity; see, for example, Mrnarević(2011), who, as previously mentioned, argued that creativity's enlistment to insidiously unfair economic (or other) doctrines benefits from its angelic and benevolent popular perception. However, my analysis differs from boththe latter and the ideas that creativity is neutral or that purely negative creativity exists in itself and, instead, addresses in Chapter 4 the cultural sources of creativity's positiveness rather than related ideological or instrumental products. The use of Derrida's concept of différance as a major theoretical framework is limited to the current chapter and to the explanation that relates to the highlighting of creativity positiveness at the expense of negativity and the (not fixed) production of its meaning as naturally benevolent. For the following chapters, I opted for theoretical coordinates of a more political character in order to address the issue of Jewish-Israeli nationalism and other eclectic topics. However, Derrida still functions as a theoretical accompaniment to these chapters, not only by relying on the analysis presented here (now contextualized in Jewish-Israeli culture and human actions) or by following
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Derrida's emphasis on the activeness and intricacies of meaning production but also by providing the transitional logic between the chapters:This dissertation moves henceforth from the public to the private and finally to the repressed. Chapter 3 (public) differs fromChapter 4 (private) which, in turn,differs fromboth Chapters 3 (public) and 5 (repressed). It is in this sense that différance can be understood as a meta-theme embodying much of the critical arguments formulated within the chapters. I now turn to the ethnography chapters and the three root metaphors that promote creativity's dimensions of positivenessas they seep into the Jewish-Israeli ethos in both discourse and practice.
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Chapter 3:Phenomenologies of Childlikeness and Ethno-National Miraculousness – The Public Frontstage of Jewish-Israeli Creativity
Introduction Chapter 2 presented two categories of theoretical insights regarding three root metaphors promoting a positive and, indeed, reverential posture toward creativity:the first relates to divinity,the "God in man" root metaphor (art, the angelic state of children, and de- theologized phenomenologies of intense living);the second relates to the human condition,the root metaphors of "modernism and capitalism" (progress, commercialization of creativity, economic prosperity, and technological utopias) and "struggle, agency, and resistance" (agency, contrarianism, and survivalist making-do). In all these categories and their derivative root metaphors, I argued that positiveness is not an "absolute knowledge.";rather, I replace such absolute knowledge with différance, namely, the understanding that positiveness as a presence entails the absence,repression or hierarchical inferiority of other constituents on a moral spectrum over which it is constructed as taking moral and temporal precedence.In all successive discussion of root metaphors, I referonly to the presence of positiveness in each of them, as explained in Chapter 2.The present chapter anchors these insights in an ethnographic account and analysis of the performative celebrations and discursive presentations of creativity in the Jewish-Israeli public sphere and its well-lit frontstage.This frontstage includes official, top-down, discursive movements and their underlying ideologies, public celebrations of creativity, widely used explanations for and of Israeli successes as well as commonly used bottom-up metaphors through which informants made sense of their own personal narratives of creativity and the conditions needed for its elicitation and nurturing. This chapterthus addresses the research's two goals.First, it relates to creativity's positiveness by offering a dynamic exploration of its manifestation and adaptation as anchored in an ethnographic multi-sited arena. Second, it relates to the Jewish-Israeli national context byreferring to key aspects mentioned in the historical review of Jewish-Israeli creativity and the elitism-paranoia nexus presented in Chapter 1.These are reworked and reframed by the words and practices of actors in the field and ultimately presented in a different light,and herein lies the specificallyethnographic contribution of this chapter.In other words, based on the theoretical roadmap,this ethnographic-based chapter strives to answer questions relating to the connection between the various forces that promulgate creativity's positiveness and the actual performative and discursive renditions of creativity in various events as well as their underlying undercurrents in the Jewish- Israeli public sphere. Several leading questions arise from the connection of real-life practices of creativity in Israelto itstheoretical positiveness:
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1.Which root metaphors are predominantly conspicuous in major public creative ethnographic sites or in personal narratives of creativity? How arethey manifested? What discourses are suppressed or absent in order to facilitate the undisturbed presence of those desired? How are they adapted by the local Jewish-Israeli culture in terms of content? What is the process of this content's discursive formation? 2. Which root metaphors and accompanyingcultural manifestations are produced or embraced more by top-down political discursive inclinations, and which are more characteristic of bottom-up movements? How do these two categories relate to each other? 3. Assuming that creativity's positiveness is intimately related to Israel's status as a creative superpower, a "thriving against all odds" nation, and other flattering positive self-images of the nation-state and the Jewish ethnos, how do these root metaphors' cultural manifestations promote and consolidate this construct? In the following pages, I present ethnographic material comprised of performative renditions of creativity as witnessed during participant observation, enriched and further developed by insights gained during interviews. These refer to two major themes highly prevalent in the Jewish-Israeli public sphere: "childlikeness" and "miraculousness." I then proceed with a theoretical analysis of these findings through which I address these questions as they relate to each sub-theme. Finally, I present the interrelatedness of both themes as a mutually supported and validated discursive system of an ever-solidifying Israel
Part 1:Childlikeness
The"Creator-as-Child" Model I begin answering the previous questions with the first theme which emanated directly from the performativity of creativity in the most highly revered concentrations of shared and public creative performances I have ever encountered during fieldwork, namely,the unconference format and its related practices which are the main ethnographic sites for this part of Chapter 3. This theme also pervaded the interviews in which informants addressed their own personal narratives of creativity. I call this themethe "creator-as- child" model or, in short,"childlikeness."It refers to the common conceptions by informants, who may be also called creators,to creativity as being somehow like or related to children and childhood. It serves as a key concept exemplified in the following ethnography and analysis, and I also refer to it as a mobilizing metaphor in that it promotes social cohesion among participants in the events where it is celebrated. In presenting this theme, I start with the observation that celebrations of creativity-as-process are often characterized ethnographically by intense moments of
73 liberated vitality:64 a freedom from constraints, a certain naïveté, and the ability to examine freely conceptual spaces of creativity. The "creator-as-child" model embodies, as presented below, a manifestation of two of the root metaphors promoting creativity's positiveness:"God-in-man" and "struggle, resistance, and agency." First, being a child bears a meaning of intense creative moments of play, humor, aliveness, and exuberant spontaneity.This thus alludes to the underlying energy of the "God-in-man" root metaphor in the sense that being a child or playing like a child (being a "little angel of creativity") contains moments of self-actualization and, to paraphrase Csikszentmihalyi (1996), moments during which one feels to be living more fully than during the rest of life. Second, since these moments of vitality are often intertwined with an exploration of creatively unconventional conceptual spaces which involves practices of contesting cultural rules, they further entail a certain freedom from constraints. As such, many moments of exaltation and rule-breaking are deeply connected to "struggle, resistance, and agency," as a human condition which promotes creativity's positiveness. This aspect relates to childlikeness in the sense that the innocence, naiveté, and untaintedness of the child denote a state that is closer to a primal condition of unenculturated and freer forms of creativity. By ignoring tradition and convention (either intentionally or unintentionally), creativity becomes more easily accessible. This primal and innocent condition denotes to some extent the différance of the impulsive and spontaneous pre- human child not only from the consciously creative God but also from the devilishly creative Satan. Similarly, for adults, the ability to enjoy childlike freedom unburdened by cultureis only possible in a context protected from oppressive cultural forces or, conversely, in an act of struggle and defiance against that same culture. This protective context is embodied in the format of the unconference.
Portrait of an Unconference No conference or exhibition in either the public or private sector is completely devoid of humor or play in some form, whether through deliberately humorous content, clever design and presentation, or invitations for interaction and experimentation. However, the unconference, repeatedly hailed by many informants as the most concentrated manifestation of creativity, is an event in which those features and qualities can be best observed. I am not referring to the unconference as categorically exceptional and singular in its content but rather as a format which can be located at the extremity of a spectrum of joie de vivre and playfulness which characterizes most creative events.
64Events that are primarily devoted to the presentation of creativity-as-products, such as exhibitions, can be more solemn and self-controlled. See Part 2 of this chapter and Chapter 4 for more on this.
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The biggest and most important unconference is Yossi Vardi's annual, multi-day "Kinnernet."65 "Geekcon" is another multi-day event gathering technical bricoleurs. Other fields (still connected to technology, innovation, or creative thinking) in which unconferencesare currently held in Israel include ecology ("Tent-Tech"), education ("Tovanet"66),music ("MuseNet"), academia (various innovation fairs and events), youth, arts, and design (particularly through higher education institutions), defense (with "Mahanet"67 as the umbrella event for all security branches but with smaller venues for specific units and organizations related to the military-industrial complex), and eclectic creativity ("TEDx" events68). While types of unconferences may differ according to these pre-chosen categories, they all share certain unifying traits. First, drawing heavily on inspiration from "open source" philosophy (see Chapter 2), the unconference is a US-sourced format and,as such, highlights the globalizing influence on Israel in the realm of creative entrepreneurship. At the same time, it is a bottom-up event in the sense that it often evolves from the initiative of a few people to a well-attended event69 or is considered a platform for unconventional and groundbreaking thoughts (thus moving from the idiosyncratically creative "bottom" to the mainstream "up"). The vast majority of unconferences are organized by members of the high-tech sector or geek community for an audience comprised mostly of a larger peer group. Participants, coming primarily from the fields of entrepreneurship, high-tech, arts, design, and other related fields, are also creators of the events' content, much of which is improvised. On the morning of the event (or sometimes sooner through online registration), participants write down the name of the workshop or talk they intend to give on erasable boards which have been divided into time slots. In some instances,particular in cases of organizations, the bottom-up movement can be identified even more clearly. When I met with the head of innovation at a large Israeli military industry, following their highly successful unconference, he said:
65Kinnernet was the first unconference format event in Israel and was inspired by US-based media entrepreneur Tim O'Reilly's "Foo Camp."("Foo" stands for "friends of O'Reilly.") In the aftermath of the dot.com collapse, O'Reilly was left with lots of unused office space. At the first Foo Camp, held in 2003, O'Reilly gathered some 200 friends in this space for a light-hearted party-like think tank event about the future of the internet, which also involved various artistic, mechanical, and computerized forms of creative bricolage. The first Israeli event took place in 2003 on the shores of Lake Kinneret, from which derives the first part of its name. The suffix "net" was added to denote the technological orientation of the event. 66The name is a play on the Hebrew word tovanot meaning insights. 67The name is a play on the Hebrew word mahane meaning military camp or army base. 68Founded in 1984 and annually active since 1990, Technology-Entertainment-Design is a US-based non-profit set of conferences under the slogan "Ideas worth spreading," addressing a wide range of issues, many relating to innovation and creativity. TED's self-descriptive mission statement includes: "We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and, ultimately, the world. So we're building a clearing house of free knowledge from the world's most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other" (Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/pages/view/id/5). The local versions of TED in Israel, known as TEDx, enjoy the active participation of some of the geek community. 69It should be noted that the more lucrative and well-known events rarely lack attendees.
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What's amazing is that all the requests to hold the event came from below. None came from the management. A few of our guys had been to the United States to this iron-man thing [he was referring to the Burning Man festival], came back, they wanted this, they spoke to Yossi Vardi, we agreed, and I'm happy we agreed. People from different departments got to meet and exchange ideas, people were able to work independently on ideas the system couldn't handle...things like that.
By referring to the unconference as bottom-up, this executive highlighted creativity as an innate force, an intrinsic and excited motivation that originates from within the individual or a peergroup of employees who he merely serves as facilitator. He also presented one metaphorical aspect of the "creator-as-child" model, namely, that "children" supposedly want creativity for which they need the permission of authoritative parental powers which, in this case, are the managerial authorities of an allegedly conservative enterprise. A second unifying trait of unconferencesis the high-powered, non- judgmental communal encouragement: every contributor is worthy of praise and applause, no matter what they choose to contribute.70 The idea of not being afraid to make mistakes and not giving in to despair in the face of failure is a powerfully recurring theme of creativity talks,workshops, and entrepreneurial circles and is thus central to unconferences. Consequently, verve and a willingness to participate and share ideas are highly praised values and, by association, so are self-reliance,cooperation, and the readiness to assist others in developing their ideas. A third characteristic is the humor and joviality of the events. As the unconference format revels in its (organized) unofficialness through chaos and humor and partly and purposefully undermines and mocks the basic organizing principles of innovation such as "smart and useless" inventions (a subject elaborated on below), they also feature a carnivalesque monde à l'envers quality delineated by Bakhtin(1965), which is expressed in the accentuated sense of humor and subversiveness that permeate the events. Most informants openly acknowledged the elitism of these events. Prior to attending my first unconference, I tried to find out from an informant who was attending the same event what was I about to see. He explained: "What you're about to see is a bunch of amazing people doing amazing things, just because they can." These events are generally perceived as more a deviation from the mundaneness of daily life than other presentations of creativity, which may present a creative product but are not, according to my informants, examples of "creativity for its own sake." The celebration
70The unconferences are exceptionally unjudgemental. Criticism of other people's ideas is discouraged and to the extent that participants share some of their projects on stage or in sessions devoted to upcoming start-ups and ideas, the audience is often asked to provide only positive feedback, intended toward the sole amelioration of the project's initial ideas.
76 of the creative agency both acknowledges the qualitative exceptionality of the individuals and their mindsets ("the smartest people in the country in full festive mode," according to another participant) and the quantitative exceptionality of their convergence in a single time and space. Of the 10 unconferences I observed, I present an in-depth ethnographic description of the one I co-coordinated for two consecutive years and of which I therefore have the most detailed and intimate knowledge. It took place in March 2013, close to the Jewish holiday of Purim, and was accordingly held in a festive spirit in the design department of Max's college. The event, entitled Birdbrain, was initiated by Max and several co-hosts (mostly entrepreneurs), organized several months in advance, and publicized through social networks with the following text:
Birdbrain is anunconference about creative passion, which takes place before the Purim holiday and brings together creative people of all types – artists, scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and just free spirits – in a celebration of creativity and fun. Presentations, workshops, and music will all be mixed together to create an amazing event.
As an open (rather than invitation-only) event, Birdbrain was attended by about 250 participants: members of the geek community, students of the college, outstanding high school students from a neighboring city, and soldiers serving in elite intelligence units. It took place over one day in both Hebrew and English, thus hinting at the globalized penchant of such events. Participants, who had either contacted us or personal contacts who we had contacted, signed up in advance to give short talks or longer lectures or to run workshops. We had ensured the submitted ideas fit the event's atmosphere without denying anyone who had signed up the right to speak. For example, we deemed a proposed talk titled "How to promote your start-up," too serious and suggested to the participant that he change the title to "How to destroy your start-up," thus delivering the same original straightforward message but in a more quirky and lighthearted fashion. The morning of the event, I arrived with my partner to assist with the preparations. We took out of Max's office a giant parrot puppet, stuffed it with newspapers, and placed it in abirdcage at the entrance of the auditorium, where it,the "Bird," would greet the participants coming to "flap their wings" and "let their minds fly." Erasable boards at the entrance listed the program: talks which had been advertised on the event's website as "ridiculous talks by serious people" and workshops. The lobby of the building hosted the usual material manifestation in the vein of the duality embodied in the "ridiculous and serious" idiom – a term interchangeable with "smart and useless" when referring to products, as discussed below – that Carmi had created: a hilariously grotesque, manually operated, headmassaging device, enabling two people
77 to sit in front of each other and massage each other's heads. Inside the lobby, there was another invention from his fertile mind: a "nuclear center" (a play on the Hebrew word garinim which means both sunflower seeds, i.e.,bird food for thought and nuclear), an idea which consisted of a heated plate rotating diagonally on top of a magnetic platform roasting sunflower seeds. When the participants arrived, theyregistered at the front desk. In order to facilitate mingling, they were encouraged to wear frivolous bird-like hats that we supplied and to participate in a game that involved guessing true-or-false statements about the other participants. After gathering and welcoming everyone in the main halland greetings made on Yossi Vardi's behalf (he arrived later), there was a short speech delivered by Jeff, a US-based entrepreneur held in high esteem by members of the community who also served as one of the co-hosts. In his speech, Jeff stressed the contribution of such events to play and to childlike states:
It's great to be here and it's great to see you all here. I just think it's so important to attend events such as this…It's great to be here for me, I get to meet old friends, meet new people, see new things, but most importantly, events like these keep me sharp because I get to be a child again. I get to leave behind what I think I should know or should be doing. I get to play like a child, be silly, and we all know that silliness is the mother of invention and creativity. Have fun everyone!
Next, having been provided with a safe and non-judgmental environment, epitomized in Jeff's congenial greetings which stressed (to an audience comprised mostly of professionals) the importance of unlearning as a precursor to creativity, the participants dispersed to the multifarious (and sometimes dare-to-fail) activities. In the main hall were a wide variety of 10-minute talks and presentations, on subjects as diverse as future technologies, the features of comic-book villains, the virtues of being a yea- sayer in all areas of life, experiences from the Burning Man festival,hackers as the internet's immune system (a talk that would later feature on TED referring to the positive meaning of hacking mentioned in Chapter 2) and even a magic show, among others. Across the hall, in the workshop area, participants were invited to various 30-minute workshops. These started with the "How to destroy your start-up" lecture (by an entrepreneur), followed by theatrical games (led by a professional actress), experimentation with creativity-enhancing techniques according to Julia Cameron's popular book The Artist's Way (by a follower of the philosophy who is also a self- professed vampirologist), music making (by two music therapists), ventriloquism 101 (by a dentist), and ended with a belly-dancing workshop (led by Max's wife, Sarah). This last workshop was of particular interest. Sarah shared with the participants that she was of Jewish-Iraqi origins and, after immigrating to Israel in the 1950s, she relocated to the
78 northern part of TelAviv where Middle Eastern music wasn't welcome due to the area’s predominantly Ashkenazi population. She said that resuming belly dancing at her age and running the workshop had helped her to rediscover and share the suppressed sights and sounds of her childhood. Sarah's words and ensuing performance exemplified a prominent motif of individual self-expression:the individual breaks free from society's critical boundaries, exhibits a "true" repressed self, and invites others to engage in the celebration, unafraid of criticism and empowered by an accepting atmosphere –just what is needed for playfulness. A moment that encapsulates one of the unconference's underlying themes occurred midway through the event. As a participant was lecturing onstage inside the auditorium, a sort of humming could be heard coming from outside. A buzz of curiosity and excitement ran through the audience, until one of the organizers went out and quickly returned to announce that a student at the college was operating a teleguided helicopter just outside the building. Max, recognizing an opportunity to practice the disruption of rules and spontaneity which befits creative thinking, stopped the lecture and urged everyone outside. As I saw everyone rushing outside, I felt frustrated and vulnerable. An improvisational group of which I was a part was scheduled to perform next, and I became deeply concerned that many would be tempted to stay and enjoy the sunshine rather than coming back inside for our presentation, especially having already spent several hours indoors immersed in activity. It also made me also deeply aware of "the rules of the game," not only in content, by referring to the degrees of freedom from coercion and a deeply curious youthful exuberance embodied in the format, but in the chief organizer's willingness to possibly jeopardize his own program in order to convey this message to the participants. During the intermission, participants were invited to join an entertaining "jam session with jam."While Max and his friends played music (joined spontaneously by two other participants, assuming saxophone and vocal duties),71there was a table on the patio with jars of actual jamwhose labels displayed the warning "may contain horsemeat" (referring to the topical 2013 horsemeat scandal). After the break, the talks and workshops resumed until the end of the day when everyone was invited to come to a nearby hall and enjoy some pre-ordered pizza. The choice of food was intentional. During the preparatory stages of the event, the organizers mentioned the need to further accentuate, by offering fast food, the somewhat childlike and informal nature of the event. Similar choices characterized other unconferences I attended. One was a two-day
71The following year, a group of drummers from a nearby school were invited to perform during the intermission. Interestingly, their performance took place in the lobby. In three other unconferences I observed, children, whose teachers counted among the participants, were actually invited to display their creative technical skills (which consisted mostly of robotic constructions). They too were limited to the entrance/lobby of the venues, preventing the children from engaging in the more adult-oriented workshops and activities inside.
79 sleepover event in which all the meals were comprised of food identified with children devoid of parental guidance or supervision (e.g., hamburgers and pizzas for lunch, hotdogs for dinner, copious amounts of ice-cream throughout the event,and the option of preparing personalized chocolate balls). Some unconferences present at the end of the event a montage of photographed or filmed parts of the event, usually with humorous and playful intent and including all of the participants. These can be either random or connected, for example,synchronized lip-synching of a pop hit by everyone. The montage is then uploaded to the event's site as a souvenir. The organizers of Birdbrain uploaded all filmed presentations along with some photographs and complimentary comments to the event's Facebook page over the following weeks, acknowledging the effort and input of all involved.
Birdbrain unconference (photos by various participants).March 2013. Play and Playfulness and the "Smartand Useless" Idiom: Young Minds in Adult Bodies, Adult Minds in Young Bodies As shown in the preceding descriptive account of the Birdbrain unconference, play as a behavioral feature attributed primarily to children is a central part of the "creator-as- child" model. Many of my informants, notably all those regularly attending unconferences, acknowledged the phylogenetic (i.e., central to a child's development) importance of play, insofar as it impacted their own development and maintenance as creative individuals. Most also formulated a rather critical and reluctant approach toward the cultural tendency noticed by Handelman (1977) to relegate play to a peripheral position in social life due to its perceived "unserious" properties in contrast to the would-be "serious" character of productive work and social interaction. For example, the first time Ziv accompanied me to Max's
80 bi-monthly meetings, a few weeks before Birdbrain, he introduced himself and his basic philosophy regarding creativity and creative people.
Ziv: I think that creative people are generally more [pauses for an instant] childlike. Max: Of course! What's an entrepreneur? It's someone who isn't afraid to speak his mind, who doubts the status quo, asks naïve and seemingly stupid questions about the ways of the world, and isn't afraid to be foolish and make mistakes. Now, what have I just described? I've described the characteristics of a four-year old.
Ziv and Max, referring explicitly to creativity and childlikeness as replete with childlike playfulness, reiterated the message evoked in Jeff's speech at the beginning of Birdbrain:72the ideal creator is a child at heart. In order to further elaborate ethnographically on unconferences, their mindsets,and this particular message and to delve deeper into the question of play, I present a comparison between the innovation classes in the BeitNatan school and a particular form of play in which many unconferences participants engage. It was evident at Birdbrain in the form of Carmi's frivolous material creations –the "smart and useless" inventions. This comparison helps clarify what being a child within the "creator-as-child" model means both ethnographically and theoretically among my informants, especially in the geek73 community. The creation of "smart and useless" inventions is similar in process to the creation of usable software through uninterrupted, intensive computer jamming. This practice, heavily influenced byopen source ideology, is often referred to as "hackathons" (Leckard, 2017). The hackathons and unconferences in which "smart and useless" inventions are created involve the gathering of highly skilled and creative individuals (mostly, though not solely, computer programmers) as well as handy creators, called "makers," for a few days of intensive collaboration. However, the bricolage in this case results in functional inventions or software that are deliberately (and proudly) preposterous, silly, or unusable,rather like the duality that characterized Birdbrain's "ridiculous talks by serious people." Carmi's head-massaging device and "nuclear center" belong to this category of products. These types of products are not only
72The same goes for relatively old age. Specifically, the extensive activity in the high-tech domain of Yossi Vardi and Shimon Peres, despite their advanced ages, led some of my informants to express the feeling that engaging with state- of-the-art creative technologies and being around creative young people, particularly in creative events, ensures vitality and rejuvenation. Vardi has in fact voiced a similar opinion when asked in interviews about his ongoing energetic and lively participation in many such events.
73I am grateful to Dr. Rafi Grosglik, for pointing out that grown-up male geeks are most often stereotypically portrayed in popular media entertainment with prepubescent features (high-pitched voices, repressed or uncertain sexuality, lack of facial hair, etc.).
81 exhibited in the event's grand finales to loud cheers and applause but also feature in most of the other unconferences I attended. While both groups, innovation class pupils and makers, share the fact that each individual or group is expected to produce a fully functioning product, there are stark oppositions between the two. In BeitNatan the invention classes served as an introduction to neoliberal practices of a capitalist-modernist reading of creativity, as the children celebrated their ability to invent marketable products. Sitting in the class under the Edison quote "Anything that won't sell I don't want to invent," the children were expected to come up with solutions to problems taken from their daily lives (or inventions of social value) and present their project's progress in class. Previously existing inventions were not permitted, and the teacher, Etty, tried her hardest to prevent "useless" or "frivolous" creations. When trying to come up with suggestions to improve the children's inventions, Etty and Menny (the technical advisor) often spoke to the children more as equals than as teachers to pupils. In the field trips to Menny's workshop in a village nearby, neither teacher attempted to render more accessible to their young students any information about Menny's works in progress (such as the invention of a unique kind of cement). Marketable inventions were held in high esteem. The children came up with various ideas:a pouch capable of preserving the heat of a piece of toast prepared in the morning for a long time, a can of coke with a recloseable cap instead of a tab (an idea which Etty thought had tremendous commercial potential), a small pillow attached to a glove enabling bus passengers to rest their heads on their hands more comfortably, and a device replacing the ring of a doorbell with an indoor light, enabling hearing-impaired people to "see" someone ringing at their door. When all the inventions were ready, they were exhibited in a regional school contest that took place in a science museum (BeitNatan did not win in either of the years that I attended). Many of the makers, when working under the "smart and useless" banner in unconferences, purposefully undermine and mock the basic organizing principles of innovation–the very values with which the children are being inculcated such as commerciality, usefulness, and seriousness– while retaining the "smart" facet through the creation of functional inventions and humor. Unconferences are typically smaller than more open events and more exclusive (most are invitation-only events) with most of the participants being men of around the age of 30–40. They primarily work in teams and, as they come predominantly from the field of high-tech, they are highly skilled in the manipulation of technology devices and in the creation of functional products. All inventions are either prepared in advance or in situ by groups or individuals or their parts are prepared and then assembled during the event and exhibited at the unconferences' grand finale. One such unconference took place in a youth center in the north of Israel with the working teams occupying all three floors of the center for three whole days. In
82 perfect accordance with the "smart and useless" idiom, the welcome page of this event's internet site advertised it as follows: "Top talent. Endless creativity.Totally useless." In contrast to Birdbrain, the attendance was almost exclusively male. All the participants were contributors and personally acquainted with the organizers;there were no outside spectators. The event was also slightly calmer than Birdbrain, as the working teams spread out in different part of the rooms and halls, surrounded by dismantled computer and various machine parts, and concentrated on their work, pausing occasionally to talk and socialize. On the roof, from where the sea could be seen, several additional teams were working on their projects, while others were trying to operate a stubborn Rube Goldberg (domino effect) machine (end eventually did). On the roof, the Participants took empty water bottles from the event and placed them upside down on wooden sticks on the rooftop walls. The wind coming from the sea spun the bottles, thus creating a playful ecological windmill experiment. In the grand finale of the unconference, which took place in a sports hall nearby, notable inventions I witnessed included a mechanical garbage can on wheels which, through its ability to recognize the movement of a raised arm raised, was capable of automatically fleeing from trash thrown at it; a urinal designed for pubs and drinking contests which measured the quantity of the user's urine and sent the data back to the user's friends' cellphones; and a device designed to hold and shake an egg, thus facilitating the preparation of an omeletby mixing the white and the yolk prior to breaking the egg. (The inventor insisted on noting that the device didn't actually work, because the membrane separating the yolk from the white is far too strong;his invention was, in fact, useless.) Another invention was a robotic barbecue grill made of dismantled and subsequently reassembled computer parts;computer ventilators fanned the grilled meat, which was held at an optimum distance from the fire by a mechanical arm equipped with a thermostat. This was the only invention which could be considered somewhat useful (albeit over-engineered). In some cases, the inventions are created following quasi-serendipitous encounters and spontaneous collaborations between makers at the events.One unconference I attended was held in a decrepit building newly acquired by the design department of a university. The organizers invited an equal number of designers and programmers in order to promote future collaborations between the two as well as several makers and musicians (Menny, the technical advisor of BeitNatan's innovation classes was also present). The general theme was virality, and the event began with a humorous lecture by a young physician on viruses and how they work. Yossi Vardi then got onstage and delivered a short speech, identifying the participants as belonging, in Florida's (2002) term, to the "creative class"and stressing the contribution of this class and these events to the development of Israeli society and its culture of innovation. Vardi left almost immediately after his speech to participate in another unconference in a neighboring city.
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The actual work began as a sort of auction; someone would spontaneously come onstage, explain their idea, and ask for the professional help of a number of specifically qualified designers and/or programmers.Volunteers raised their hands, and small groups formed which worked continuously for 48 hours, each in a separate room with a few breaks for (fast) food and live music sessions in the living room. The results–humorous, subversive, and playful displays of imaginative design communicated via screenable technology–were purposefully of no commercial value whatsoever and, on the whole, suited the "smart and useless" idiom. As in other unconferences, creativity (in this case, the particular creative association of design and programming) was identified with the activity that arises from intrinsically motivated desires and is best manifestedin the low- pressure, playful, and protective context of the unconference format. The comparison between children's innovations and the "smart and useless" inventions is clear. However, it became even more conspicuous during one of the most powerful and insightful ethnographic moments I experienced during fieldwork, when I unexpectedly witnessed what I interpreted as a manifestation of a "smart and useless" moment at the BeitNatan school. On the only occasion when I was actually invited to the school (as opposed to me initiating the visit), Vered, the principal, called and invited me to come and "see" creativity in action at the school. As it wasn't during the regular hours of the innovation classes, I inquired about the nature of the event, and Vered replied that it was a show the children were putting on for their families on the theme of Passover and the Exodus from Egypt. I arrived at the school on a Friday morning, as all the children and their families were convening in the sports hall. There was a festive atmosphere, the children were busy with their costumes, and an orchestra was getting ready to play songs that some of the children would sing.It happened just before the beginning of the event, as the teacherswere trying to calm the children down for the beginning of the presentation. The first row of the orchestra comprised seven flautists, andas the children were waiting to exhibit their musical abilities and growing restless, one of the children tried playfully to insert one open end of his flute into the bottom end of his friend's flute; another girl then joined in, and the three children created a three- flute instrument.The rest of the children quickly joined the experiment, until a seven- flute-long instrument was being held by the children in a single row.They were enthralled and intrigued by their creation and tried to blow into the flute to see if it would generate any kind of sound. The experiment was cut short by the teacher who told the children to stop their nonsense, sit down properly, and open their music sheets,in other words,to get ready for the exhibition of "true" creativity as exemplified in the disciplined rendition of music as a creative art form. Meanwhile, I was sitting among teachers and families, thinking that this was exactly what makers would try and do (albeit with more skill and technique) and wondering whether anyone else in the audience was aware that this seemingly insignificant short moment of indiscipline would have ranked as a highly
84 respected form of creativity among the most creative of my adult informants. When I shared this anecdote with Max, he replied:
Yes! Yes! This is precisely the thing that is being suppressed. It's like when a child puts a cooking pot over his head and says "I'm a soldier and this is a helmet"– only here they are saying,"we are inventors and this is a new kind of flute"– and the parent says, "No, it's not! It's a cooking pot, take it off!" Who said there is only one way to play a flute? Those kids could've been on their way to finding out something amazing, a new kind of instrument! That is just devastating for a child's creativity, and for anyone's creativity really.
Max acknowledged that this story encapsulated many of the characteristics of the "creator-as-child" model: the display of a playfully divergent mode of thought, undisciplined, slightly (in this case) defiant but also, unfortunately, weak in the face of power and in need of protection. Those characteristics are recurrent themes in my interviews with the informants-creators.
Weakness, Defiance,and Indiscipline: The "Creator-as-Child" Model and the Israeli National Character in Interviews In the in-depth interviews I conducted, 22 of the 32 interviewees significantly related creativity to some form of childlikeness or to their own childhood in which they located the onset and inspiration of their own creativity. The themes emerging from these interviews echoed the core of the specific previous ethnographic example (the children's orchestra and Max's response), which also characterizes unconferences in general (in the sense that the unconference offers protection to a culturally irreverent and experimental creative flame that would dwindle in the normative social order). In other words, various aspects of the "creator-as-child" model, which are evident in performative renditions of creativity,run concurrently in many of the creators' personal narratives and opinions about the creative process. Some of these constituents are acknowledged as patently Israeli or in the vein of the irreverent Israeli national character referred to in Chapter 1 and areeven seen to explain the Israeli competitive edge in the realm of innovation. Of those themes, I found weakness– the child's vulnerability and helplessness – to be the most basic foundationof the "creator-as-child" model. It struck meas a feature inherent to the child's innocence and naïveté, especially when facing teachers, peers, parents or others. Many informants told stories about unsympathetic and derisive teachers trying to impose uniform behavioror the social hardship of being, for example, dyslexic in school as a precursorto eventually being able to see and do things differently (i.e., being creative) and related their struggles and weakness in childhood to creativity.
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I present two extended quotes from these interviews.The first is from my interview with Ilan, a toy inventor whom I met at a professional exhibition and later interviewed in his workshop (during the interview he showed me on his cellphone the illustration below his quote):
We are raised in this clear structure that was created because of the way in which Western society began to live about 150 years ago. We need people to enter these rubrics as quickly as possible and, forgive me, but you work in one of those institutions that are responsible for moving people through a sieve, cataloging them, giving them grades, and measuring their worth. They tell you in kindergarten not to go outside the lines, and you go outside the lines because that’s how it came out. The teacher brings you back and says,"the task is to stay within the lines," because she went to a teaching training college and there they told her that by the end of kindergarten a child needs to know seven letters of the alphabet and how to calculate one plus one, and the parents are happy because the child appears to be really smart. Society ignores the person as an individual and ignores their essence, and the search for this missing piece of the puzzle in life is crucial in order for us to self-actualize. With creativity, you need to be smart, meaning that you need to understand how the system works and what motivates it, so that you are able to overcome it.
The other quote is from my interview with Carmi, the elderly genius of Max's group. As my fieldwork progressed and my personal relationships with Max's group became stronger, Carmi trusted me enough to confide in me the following story, which remains for me the most impressive example of the link between childhood, weakness, and creativity. He started his anecdote with a smile: "I owe my entire career to a pedophile…I became an inventor because I was attacked by a pedophile when I was 10 years old." Shocked at first, I nodded, signaling him to go on:
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It was before the creation of the State of Israel. We were living in Jerusalem next to a junkyard, which was kind of my playground. There, one day, I was attacked by a pedophile and ran home. Too frightened to go outside, I stayed at home for a full year. I categorically refused to go outside or go to school, so I just stayed at home. Slowly, my parents encouraged me to start doing things around the house, tighten a screw here, hammer a nail there...I also followed my mother around the house and pretty soon learned how to knit from her – I was starting to work with my hands, to do things. I knitted a whole sweater for my first girlfriend. At 16,I had built my own motorbike. I didn't buy it, I built it from scraps I found in that junkyard to which I eventually returned. I nicknamed it "the Indian," and the motor eventuallydied from overheating on climbing the hill up toward Jerusalem, but that's beside the point…I also built the house I live in now, inventing along the way devices to solve problems as they popped up during the building. I had become an inventor.
For Ilan, creativity is simultaneously a given, a means, and an end. It is a precious universal spark of human life, possessed by the child naturally and sabotaged early on by adults through the educational demands of conformity in a soulless, mathematical categorization of industrial society. This spark can be recovered in time through a certain personal process, which for him (and many others) manifests itself as the self-actualizing entrepreneurial lifestyle. This kind of creativity, namely, the untainted natural spark, can be recovered by creatively outsmarting the educational system, in other words a ploy that defeats a powerful, albeit clumsy, system. In terms of the root metaphor, the "God- in-man" spark of childhood can be lost but can also be recovered through "struggle, resistance, and agency." Carmi's personal account of creativity refers only to the second root metaphor. It suggests the disruption of a normal course of action during which an act of persecution, the pedophile's attack, generates a process of creative learning. Without fully asserting it, Carmi implied that the anomaly of being creative is underscored by misfortune, in his case, at a most vulnerable stage, during childhood. His survival from the attack setoff a course involving both passive and active learning of and through creative means.Both Ilan and Carmi eventually overcame their predicament. Defiance and indiscipline as variants of "struggle, agency, and resistance"were largely referred to during other interviews as being relevant to the "creator-as-child" model. In Chapter 1, I reviewed several writers who have referred to common Israeli personality traits such as indiscipline, informality, and the constant questioning of authority (see particularly, Katriel, 2004; Senor & Singer, 2009 and Yair, 2011). In Chapter 2, I demonstrated that one of the impetuses promoting creativity's positiveness is precisely creativity's essence as a practice of rule-breaking and resistance. Not unsurprisingly, many of my informants, namely from the high-tech/geek sector, perceiving Israelis as benefitting from their own indiscipline, expressed a confluence
87 between these two discourses, often connecting the state of indiscipline to childlikeness and accentuating this feature as uniquely Israeli in contrast tothe discipline of other countries. Max once talked jokingly about the challenge of an upcoming conference in Germany (his talk was exceptionally humorous and playful), as the overly rigid Germans, he stated, could not really be mistaken for a creative people. In another instance, I was driving back from an unconference, and two participants Erez and Reuven hitched a ride with me. In the carthey shared their experiences of working in various places around the world and, at my request, talked about the personality of the Israeli employee in the high-tech field. Reuven said:
Israelis have no discipline whatsoever. A German or an American will remain in their cubicle and do what they're told, but with the Israeli, you'll always see his head pop up behind other people to see what they're working on. They'll always be interested: "What are you doing? What is this? What is that? What's that for?" They'll go around and bug the hell out of the other employees.
Erez laughed as Reuven used a high-pitched voiceto imitate an over-zealous worker eager to learn new things. He smiled and nodded, silently concurring with Reuven. Reuven then turned to me and said,"but this is how you get interdisciplinary, you bring your own ideas to other people and you use theirs." On a similar theme, David, one of my most erudite and knowledgeable informants (due to his long experience in the field of Israeli journalism), talked about Israeli chutzpah when comparing between Israeli and South Korean national traits:
Israeli success is a question that they [the South Koreans] are obsessed with. It's actually one of the missions of their embassy – to collect information on the Israeli culture of creativity. Many universities in Seoul research this; it's almost a national obsession. South Korea comes in one of the top three places in any kind of international testing – OECD, UNESCO, primary schools, whatever –and despite this, they don't have Nobel prizes and haven't invented anything significant. All of South Korean industry is based on things invented by others, imitations of other things. Even in the names: Hyundai is an imitation of Honda and so on…They excel at everything that exists, but they can't imagine something that doesn't. And it's not surprising, because when you look at the South Korean educational system you can't help but be put off by the near Nazi discipline in the classroom. It's really, really crazy. Those kids who come home and immediately go off to a pre-determined course of private lessons…It's a supposedly democratic and egalitarian educational system, but if you want your child to succeed, you need to give him private tutoring from second grade, and they all go to bed at 10 pm….There is no parent in Israel who would agree to such a thing, there simply isn't. To me, there is something fascinating
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in comparing this to Israeli chutzpah which is, in my opinion, not so much insolence, as many would claim, but the concept that you can have an idea and fearlessly carry it out without societal approval or without necessarily possessing all the formal knowledge one would theoretically need and show flexibility as you go along. I don't see South Koreans doing that.
Reuven, Erez, and David all illuminated the prime aspect of the "creator-as-child" model: the freedom to be undisciplined, the same freedom celebrated in unconferences as ethnographically exemplified above. Furthermore, they consider this propensity toward freedom as an Israeli national characteristic, a personality trait of playfulness and indiscipline coupled with strength and agency, affirming unequivocally that these traits are advantageous and do indeed provide Israelis with a competitive edge when coming up with novel ideas and carrying them out. In other words, elitism is where the creative process ends (in their achievement) but also where it starts (in their singular rejection of [over]discipline). The subject of childhood is addressed as both literal and figurative. Metaphorically, Israelis are akin to children in their disrespect for rules and order (such as the inability to sit still) but also in their greater accessibility to a more playful state of mind. In reaffirming Israel's status as a creative superpower, David particularly compared his perception of real-life educational systems and child-rearing practices in Israel and South Korea, correlating discipline with a lack of creativity and thus implying that lack of discipline equals creativityin a model opposing academic and mimetic achievements with creative achievements in bringing the "new" into existence. Hesuggested that in a cultural climate that allowed children to be children and did not suffocate childlikeness with overzealous discipline, creativity would flourish. The practices celebrating creativity that are demonstrated in the unconference format are the very embodiment of such a cultural climate.
Discussion The "creator-as-child" model I have presented forms, for the members of the "creative community" as well as the general public, an integral metaphor which is part of the publicly and privately acknowledged representation of creativity, both in its manifestations and the conditions required for its nurturing. I have shown that the unconferences (the specific public forms of celebrating "childlike" creativity), are the formation of a bottom-up process. The events are organized periodically for and by the people of the "creative community" and are constructed according to the intrinsic motivation to enhance collective and individual creativity, the sharing of ideas, and warm camaraderie. Its emphasis in terms of content is on a mature form of playfulness, from which one can derive humor, fun, and the necessity as well as the obligation to break with or mock the normative convention of the workplace or marketable innovation
89 in order to contribute to it. This is because creativity and innovation, which correspond to the root metaphors of "God-in-man" and "modernism and capitalism," do not fully overlap and may even contradict each other, each highlighting a different definition of creativity and different practices and emotional states that relate to creativity.The model of the unconferences is therefore an attempt to bridge the gap between these two basic metaphors of creativity through stimulating references to childlike humor and creative play. The verbal exchange between Ziv and Max relating to the similarities between an entrepreneur and a four year old is provocative precisely because of the serious/unserious dichotomy that the unconference is trying to subvert. In other words, by their own accounts and also embodied in the unconference's self-conscious ambience, my informants claim to engage in play in order to be able to work (in other words, not to play.) However, play, in the emic sense of the term, is insufficient in terms of formulating an adequate understanding of what the unconference is and does and also what it is not and does not do. The concept of play, as formulated by Bateson (1956) and Handelman (1977, 2001), is more insightful and fitting, since it is not the name of an action but rather the name of a frame for action (Nachmanovitch, 2009).The concept of play brings complexity and paradoxicality to the unconference format and allows an understanding that goes beyond the interpretation of a straightforward celebration of merely being "childlike." It explains how tensions between possibly contradictory components of these two root metaphors ("God-in-man" and "modernism and capitalism") can be resolved to the benefit of creative industries. I am specifically referring to the paradoxes that may contrast creativity (dilettantism, distraction, process, and silliness) to innovation (professionalism, concentration, product, and seriousness). Indeed, as exemplified in the organic, "bottom-up" demand for the event from managerial powers, the rigidity of the workplace, even when innovative, is construed as the opposite of the exhilaration and freedom that childlike creativity brings during the unconferences. As Handelman (2001) argued, the mundane – in this case, work – serves as a form of reference to play the unconference and notions of childlikeness. It is a foundation that can be altered and turned into something else, while retaining the possibility of carrying back the important messages of the experience when engagement with the world is resumed. However,this shift from one state (the professional) to another (play) must be facilitated; it is not an obvious move. Often, the invitation to engage in play is initiated by and comes from symbolic types. In their 2016 article, Kidron and Handelman revisited the concept of symbolic type by exploring the life and work of a cultural entrepreneur who founded an alternative Holocaust museum and center in Israel. This cultural entrepreneur combined her own Holocaust-related biography with a ludic-based approach to create seemingly "outrageous" practices and discourses of remembrance without losing the legitimacy and leadership of her in-group. Her practices and unique speech as symbolic types deform and transform conventional
90 approaches to the somber subject matter, reconciling seemingly related paradoxes in Israeli culture. It is in this sense that Vardi, Max, and Jeff are both symbolic types and cultural entrepreneurs; they are,for example, mediators between a world characterized by professional competence with little sensuous pleasure and their initiative to celebrate in the unconferences a pleasure allegedly devoid of the need to prove competence. The unconference's second rule of encouraging every participant and applaud failure testifies to this sentiment. Symbolic types use their own proven abilities, in this case entrepreneurship (Vardi and Jeff), or academic achievements (Vardi and Max), to create and legitimize the unconference idea as a place that mediates between these two altered states:the professional and the play-like sphere. The arena of the unconference is a place that can subvert the normative social order,where the symbolic type can operate as a gateway to the state of play and where the contradiction between the seriousness of the workplace and the frivolity of the festivalesque is temporarily resolved. For example, "useless" inventions can be presented or played as (and even required to be) "smart". Likewise, "serious" people can be allowed to deliver "ridiculous" talks. The unconference's participants follow the symbolic types, and their authority leads the rest of the participants in"child-like" practices. They introduce the event and give their blessings to its peculiarities; they are usually the first to "make the mistakes" of silliness and are able to demonstrate their own professional and personal creative selves by undoing their everyday serious selves. In Jeff's speech, for example, he asserts that it is unlearning (i.e.,the adult's transformation into a child) and not learning (i.e.,the child's transformation into an adult) - an inversed perception of time - that brings along creative benefits that the participants ought to be seeking. Creativity in this sense is celebrated not only as a presence of childlikeness but also as the proclaimed absence of adulthood. However, since all the participants are adults, adulthood is not absent but rather co- present, its peculiarities accentuated by being interwoven in the unconference.All three symbolic types retain their hierarchical positions as both leaders and mediators of unconventionality. They mediate between childlike creativity and their status as entrepreneurs who are publicly acknowledged to have acquired great wealth through their talent, namely,the ones who have "made it" in professional innovation. At such events, they are the "clerical" authorities of the unconference's "dogma" and are closely followed (and protected) by their entourage. Social boundaries are thus maintained and are not easily approachable, albeit more so than usual. Vardi, Max, and Jeff are thus able to position themselves both within the context of their in-group and above it, leading and participating, because they can move in and out of any category that relates to either seriousness or silliness in discourse or practice. They embody the paradox. Furthermore, their ability to disseminate the unconference format and vision outside the immediate realm of hi-tech also displays a certain ability to transform social realities due to the contradiction between"childlikeness" and any form of profit-driven creativity. The first
91 paradox possibly resolved through play therefore concerns the polarity between seriousness and silliness. The second paradox possibly resolved through play is the one between professional specialization, emphasized in innovation and unprofessional scattered knowledge. Participants, many of whom entertain a wide array of non-professional interests, display them as part of their obligation to contribute creatively to the event. Play, according to Handelman (2001), places people in a multiplicity of possibilities, which is, in itself, an adequate definition of creativity. Handelman's observation follows Bateson's statement that play is a meta-message, a context marker that classifies other actions and messages. The unconference is not solely about creativity but also about how creativity may be creatively fashioned. In the unconference, the idea of play as a context marker and as a marker of the multiplicity of possibilities has a twofold meaning. The first and perhaps more obvious meaning is in reference to a plethora of stimuli and information which favors cross-pollinating encounters and celebrates personal expression. One is expected to both remain open and to contribute to the multiple themes which may spark creative interest. However, it is not only about learning new things "in passing";it also resembles Stack and Callahan's (2007) conceptualization of creativity as a "flux mode." This refers to a state of stimulated creativity characterized by engagement with the world (as opposed to disengagement from the world to avoid distractions), in which the conscious mind occupies itself with matters other than the creative problem at hand (e.g.,a professional project), and punctuated more by what are known as "eureka moments," when the creative solution to that problem may appear in the creator's mind as a sudden and pleasurable flash of insight. Due to the anarchic and playful nature of the flux events and the involvement of multiple agencies, the emplacements of the peak experiences are personal, fluid, and diffused. Flux events stress an engagement with the world in the sense that the scattered and nonlinear structure of multiple different and unconnected ideas (or unprecedented experiences) invite the participant to an active openness and to a phenomenological engagement with a wider world of intellectual, physical, and aesthetic stimuli. In this sense, the phenomenology of creativity may contribute to professional innovation. Aside from the abundance of subjects of interest, the wide range of possibilities also emphasizes the possibility of experiencing a given theme differently. In other words, everything that happens during the unconference – pitching an idea, being introduced to someone, consolidating one's reputation, and so on – also happens in the mundane world. The difference is that in the unconference, participants are encouraged to explore the various possibilities of doing them differently and freely:for example,presenting an idea in an unorthodox way (the "how to destroy your start-up" talk), encouraging a business- oriented conversation via an amusing workshop, or freely expressing thoughts and ideas that would require more restraint in everyday life. Nachmanovitch (2009) argued that the
92 opposite of play is not work, seriousness, or depression but rather one-dimensionality or literal-mindedness. Although some of my informants also saw work and seriousness as the opposite of play, in this particular paradox it is precisely one-dimensionality and literal-mindedness that are negated by play which propels people out of the limiting mindset of things and contexts. Whether through a somewhat superficial exploration of of the range of thematic possibilities or an in-depth exploration of the many possibilities within specific issues, this direction is the nature of the resolution of this paradox, a paradox which opposes professional concentration or a precise approach to a given issue, to multiple fields of interest which may appear superficial or the willingness to engage in unorthodox readings of professional topics. The last paradox regarding the unconference refers to the seemingly absent and yet present relation between play and payoff. Bateson was critical of the notion that goals can be specified and the means of attaining those goals can be planned with articulate clearness (Bateson & Ruesch, 1951 in Nachmanovitch, 2009). He specifically criticized the promotion of play in educational or work settings with clear goals because, he claimed, when actively searching for a payoff during play, one is no longer playing. Innovation, the reading of creativity in terms of its products,is some sort of "payoff." In terms of process, however, creativity emphasizes the energetic and excited phenomenology of feeling "creative," regardless of whether it yields any product. Play in the unconference offers protection to the seemingly "less lucrative" creativity,namely, the process that may not generate profit, but without denying the importance of innovative payoff. This is manifested in the third rule of unconferences that refers to the "smart and useless" idiom. In unconferences, the emphasis on uselessness is a means of ensuring that the participants' mindsets are not distracted by contemplation of any possible material purpose or business-related endeavor.For example, Max's advertisement for Birdbrain is an invitation to engage in creativity without mentioning anything in particular. Although participants tacitly expect to be somehow rewarded by play, they acknowledge the fluid dynamic between finding benefit in play and playing for the fun of it and understand that play can only be put to work indirectly. Following the "smart and useless" rule, participants mock and berate the rules of the capitalist game of innovation and assert the importance of freedom and defiance in the fostering of creativity through their engagement in play. In the context of play, uselesness and desenculturation become equal or even superior to the normative far more important idea of being useful,the cultural normativity of neoliberalism, and conventional manifestations of innovation. This duality (useless/useful activity) and the focus on uselessness in particular is interpreted as play and childlikeness, in which adults access an "inner child's world" and become enriched with highly beneficial childlike and playful properties. The duality pervades the unconferences and serves as a reference to personal creativity:fostering creativity is possible only if payoff is removed,
93 even temporarily, from consideration. In this sense, another form of the "elitism- paranoia" nexus impacts the cultural constructs of children and adults. The creative child is weak but not paranoid;the innovative adult, on the other hand, most definitely fears losing the creative spark and struggles constantly to maintain it by referring to the child whose creative nature is in some respects perceived as above the adult's creative elitism. For the adult, play suggests but does not guarantee a creative payoff. However free and uninhibited the unconference is in its childlike environment, there are still some unwelcomed and suppressed practices and themes. Handelman (2001) observed that since play is implicated in the making of change, it is potentially violent and destructive.However, violence is suppressed when play is rationally and appropriately framed outside of mundane reality. Likewise the unconference is an organized activity and is by no means an open invitation to chaos and the potential destructiveness of play. For example, when Max broke his own rules, I had a clear sense that this could have easily jeopardized the safe environment for play. Other forms of violence, such as criticism of prominent figures or of the unconference itself as well as internal rivalries, disagreements that relate to political ideologies or professional approaches to entrepreneurship and the like, are never raised during such events (rather they are discussed in private as I show in Chapter 4). Similarly, the Israeli nation-state as an entity is both present and absent.While unconferences in Israel unquestionably celebrate its status as a "start-up nation," they are not overtly connected to grand ethno- national narratives of the nation-state (as depicted in Chapter 1), although my informants did acknowledge similarities between the "creator-as-child" model and the Israeli national character. Furthermore, the undeniably violent geopolitical context within which Israel's status as a creative superpower has evolved is noticeably downplayed and disavowed (but widely referred to in part 2 of this chapter).
Referring back to the theoretical roadmap depicted in Chapter 2 and to the first question of this chapter concerning the ethnographic manifestations of the root metaphors promoting creativity's positiveness, I argue that creativity's positiveness relates to the "creator-as-child" model in three ways: "God in man" "struggle, resistance, and agency," and the interconnectivity between the two. Insofar as the "God-in-man" metaphor is concerned, the public sphere is infused with positiveness: first, through the underlying energy of living intensely and fully, the optimal phenomenology of human existence that has replaced the religious ecstasy of creativity discussed in Chapter 2; and second, through the cultural construct within the metaphor of children as "little angels of creativity." Naive, innocent, and pre-human due to not yet being culturally indoctrinated, childhood is idealized as a state from which spontaneous, curious, intrinsic, and intuitive creativity is more accessible. This accessibility, from which the adult creator may greatly benefit, relates primarily to the
94 practice and the state of mind of playfulness. Although play deals primarily with adult paradoxes, it is culturally construed as belonging to children and the realm of childhood.This innocent playfulness is even more positive as, in its purity, it is devoid of both a God-like consciousness toward the social order andany devilish or harmful intent. However, in relation to God in particular, since innocence denotes both a state of being angelic and a lack of consciousness, the child entertains a play of similarities and differences from God whom he partly resembles;the child is different from God but différant from the devil. Regarding "struggle, agency, and resistance," the ethnographic findings demonstrate through the duality of the "smart and useless"/"ridiculous and serious" idioms that much of the creativity displayed within the "creator-as-child" model of these events is, indeed, an act of resistance; play is required to mediate between intrinsic and intuitive creativity,on the one hand, and normative social and professional innovation,on the other. These idioms represent both the material acceptance and the rejection of modernist and capitalist practices relating to instrumental cosmologies of creativity. Through them, makers and participants in the unconference format assert that moments of "true" and revitalizing creative celebrationtake place away from the oppression of the normative social interaction and productive work routine of their daily lives and even from their social selves (which are acknowledged by all involved to benefit from these reinvigorating events). In order to access the "creator-as-child" model, the adult creator has to enter a protective state in which the social order is temporarily suspended. Furthermore, the interconnectivity of "struggle, agency, and resistance" with the "God-in-man" metaphor (from which the concept of "little angels of creativity" emanates) must be taken into account. First, by being characterized by creative spontaneity and an absence of enculturation, children are often prone to displays of defiance and indiscipline against adults, not in the harmful or dangerous sense of the word but in an entirely positive connotation. Second, in the collision course between children and adults, children struggle more due to their inherent weakness. Both of these points are exemplified ethnographically in the interview excerpts, in which they are recognized as part of the Israeli national character. The two other promoters of creativity's positiveness – art and the root metaphor "modernism and capitalism" – are also evident in these ethnographic sites, albeit to a somewhat lesser extent. Art is present through design, dance, music, theatre, visual presentations, and other forms of creative fine arts. Likewise, "modernism and capitalism" is manifested in many presentations, in the professional background of most of theparticipants,and in the final exhibited products (and the process of their making). Nevertheless, insofar as the "creator-as-child" model is concerned, the Jewish-Israeli public sphere is endowed with positiveness primarily via the "God-in-man" metaphor and the social condition that is "struggle, agency, and resistance." I continue to explore
95 all aspects of creativity's positiveness, alongside less prominent manifestations of the "creator-as-child" model in the second part of this chapter, which deals with the second major theme present in the Jewish-Israeli public sphere: miraculousness.
Part 2: Miraculousness
Introduction In Part 2 of this chapter, I continue answering the questions presented at the beginning of the chapter about the major manifestations of the root metaphors that promote creativity's positiveness in the Jewish-Israeli public sphere. Through the presentation and analysis of ethnographic material originating in guided tours, exhibitions, competitions, and representations of Israeli exploits in cyberspace, which constitute the main ethnographic sites of interest for this part, I present the second major theme that pervades the public sphere, a theme which I have called miraculousness. Miraculousness is a key concept which comprises the pairing of two discursive strands directly connected to the two root metaphors, promoters of creativity's positiveness, referred to in Chapter 2 as belonging to the category of "the human condition": "modernism and capitalism" and "struggle, agency, and resistance." The first strand relates to the physical presentation or reference to commercial and technological functional creativity in the public sphere,that is, creative products in accordance with a capitalist and modernist reading of creativity. It thus connects with"modernism and capitalism," which within a capitalist, post-Marxist cosmology is positive in and of itself. The second discursive strand is what I call Israel's inherently inferior conditions as part of what I termed the Jewish-Israeli elitism-paranoia nexus. This refers both to Israel's geopolitical weakness in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict,whichwas considered by some informants to reach back to the Jewish near and distant past, and to Israel's lack of natural resources. Miraculousness thereby juxtaposes Israel's material achievements in instrumental domains with Israel's inherent inferiority and constructs Israeli achievements as the result of triumph over obstacles and even a romantic narrative of transcendence,plugging directly into the heart of contemporary Jewish-Israeli nationalism informed by an historical collective memory, as mentioned in the introduction. In addition, it resonates forcefully with the root metaphor of "struggle, agency, and resistance" as a promoter of creativity's positiveness. The specific interconnectivity of Israel's inferiority and modernist technology is manifested in performative renditions of creativity, which I refer to as the defiance of nature. In this sense, normalcy, natural laws, or probabilities – which contradict Israel's very
96 existence– are being altered, domesticated, and defied through modernist-inclined technology and creative skills.
Israel's Inferior Conditions from theTop-Down: Israel and the Conflict/ Israel as a Creative Superpower Whereas the "creator as child" model is essentially a bottom-up phenomenon, miraculousness is both top-down and bottom-up. As with the "creator-as-child," it is a bottom-up phenomenon in the sense that its basic tenets are widely agreed upon among creators. However, it is also a top-down phenomenon in the sense that Israel's branding as a capital of innovation and creativity against all odds, as part of a conservative reading of Zionism and its accompanying nationalism, is politically endorsed by various official and unofficial Israeli agents. In order to address the top-down presentations of miraculousness and the presentation of achievements in spite of inherently inferior conditions, I begin with the ethnography that conveysthe message from Israelis to non- Israelis and non-Jews in various sites and occasions. Specifically, insofar as Israel's inferiority is concerned, I begin with the Arab-Israeli conflict. This issue, central to the Jewish-Israeli elitism-paranoia nexus, is approached by different actors in the field with varying degrees of caution and directness. I thus use the ethnography to answer:what are the discursive strategies through which the conflict and miraculousness relate to each other and how are they manifested in the field? In the following pages, I elaborate on these strategies and approaches. One approach is characterized by the attempt to avoid mention of the conflict or to overtly transform the image of Israel from of a land of conflict to one of creativity and innovation. In the early stages of my fieldwork, I encountered a Knesset lobbyist at a professional exhibition. Upon hearing the subject of my research, he immediately referred me to a middle-agedwoman named Sandra, who had founded and now ran one of Israel's non-governmental nation-branding initiatives. He lauded the importance of her work for Israel. Sandra, who had grown up abroad in a Zionist Jewish family,had become frustrated with the representation of Israel in her country and contacted Israeli diplomats to discuss her suggestions for dealing with this. During a meeting in her office, she explained to me:
What we're doing here is branding. Just like you can brand a product, you can brand a city or a country. Here's the problem: if you walk into a bookstore anywhere in the world and look for books about Israel, you will most likely find books about the conflict time and again. It is unhealthy and unwise to engage in reactive counterarguments over the same issue because it's pointless, you get stuck in a loop. Israel is not all about the conflict, there are other things going on here. Israel is
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literally a world capital of innovation and creativity. This is amazing and that's something the average Joe abroad isn't aware of. So we work in cyberspace; we hold conferences and seminars; we do guided tours and work with exchange students so they can learn more about Israel's culture of innovation. We try to hit them in the gut. It must be emotional, they have to feel that energy here. What we are trying to do is to shift away from the conflict and offer a different issue, another paradigm if you will, through which one may form a more favorable opinion of Israel.
In Sandra's efforts to debunk a persisting myth and reshape the Israeli public frontstage, the conflict and Israeli achievements are competing narratives in Israel's global image as either a negatively portrayed country devastated by war or a positively portrayed land of innovation. The conflict is not denied, but the outsider is construed as critically misinformed and it is assumed best to appeal to the heart rather than the mind. Thematically speaking, despite the ongoing relation between the military-industrial complex and the Israeli high-tech industry described in Chapter 1, the conflict and innovation are engaged in a zero-sum game in which the latter is enlisted as a pleasurable and energetic counter-discourse to actively fight off, albeit not completely, the former, which is seen as overly pervasive in all that relates to Israel. The concept of miraculousness is thereby present inIsrael's promotionas miraculous in its concentration of creative technological entrepreneurship, which infuses it with positiveness. As already mentioned, the conflict is thus not discursively totally obliterated but rather recast as an issue of secondary importance.74 In other instances, Israel's inherent geopolitical inferiority as perceived by the elitism-paranoia nexushas been enlisted and articulated in a far more straightforward and forceful fashion. Mialet (1999) claimed convincingly that Stephen Hawking's crippled body is always present when talking about his powerful mind; the awe- inspiring qualities of his mind are enhanced by the contrast to the wretched state of his body. Similarly, Israel's geopolitical paranoid frailty is almost always mentioned in contrast to its astounding achievements.My visit toahigh-tech summer camp in Israel in July 2011 clearly demonstrated this. The one-month summercamp was located in a youth village and was held entirely in English. All the camp counselors were Israelis. The 30 campers, mostly Jewish boys,were aged from 10 to 19and came predominantly from the United States (with three from Europe, three from South America, and two from Israel). Upon arrival, they were greeted by Itay, a counselor in his mid-twenties, who delivered the following monologue:
74 Downplaying the conflict in favor of the technology characterized many (but not all) professional exhibitions, with the most obvious exceptions being defense exhibitions, which both directly and indirectly address the conflict by highlighting Israel's tactical expertise and innovative capacity via military equipment.
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Imagine a small country, a tiny country, surrounded by enemies, with no oil. That country is only 1.6% of a certain region and yet produces 95% of the high-tech products originating in that region. That country is younger than some of your grandparents and yet has met with incredible challenges. Did you know, for example, that its population doubled in size during the first few years following its creation? Imagine yourself ingesting your own weight in food while fighting! Six wars later and it hasmore start-ups per capita than any other country in the world and is second only to the United States and Canada in the number of companies listed on NASDAQ. Isn't that amazing? That country also influences the world! Who here eats cherry tomatoes? Developed in Israel. Who here uses a USB flash drive? An Israeli invention…Okay, who here uses a cellphone? Everybody hold up your phones, yes! Take them out, hold them high! [the campers happily comply]. This technology too was developed in Israel.
After Itay's introduction, the young participants dispersed to the mess hall. During the short walk from the bus to the hall, as the juniorcampers were discussing camp-related issues (plans for free time, room sharing, etc.), my attention was caught by verbal exchanges among the senior campers which echoed Itay's themes and enthusiasm. Several campers were trying to name and place in chronological order the six wars Itay had mentioned. I overheard one senior saying to another, in reference to the list of Israeli achievements: "That's the beauty of the Jewish mind, man, there's nothing else." Another senior camper was trying to educate a younger one by elaborating on the exploits detailed by Itay: He omitted a lot of stuff, you don't have only technology here. Technology will only get you so far. You have research, that's far more important, that's where the new technology comes from. Nobel Prize winners, there's one guy who won the Nobel Prize this year.75 There are so many things. He didn't say the half of it.
The children were then divided into three agegroups: the kilobytes (10–12), megabytes (13–15), and gigabytes (16–19). In addition to the usual outdoor camp activities such as swimming, sports activities, and hikes, there were also compulsory technological activities according to the different age groups. The kilobytes were designated low-grade robotics such as assembling robots capable of simple tasks whose parts were delivered in pre-prepared boxes. The megabytes were assigned software programming of various degrees of complexity:from learning new software (for example, creating electronic music) to hacking and altering software such as video games. The gigabytes were expected to work in groups of four and to presentat the end
75This camper was referring to Israeli researcher Prof. Dan Shechtman who was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2011.
99 of the camp a fully-realized entrepreneurial idea – a start-up. When I came back at the end of the camp to observe the senior's presentations, the camp director asked me to fill in for one of the judges who hadn’t turned up. I was introduced to the teenagers as a researcher of creativity (and therefore suitable for evaluating their work) and took my place alongside the other counselors and entrepreneurs in the discussions following the presentations. I also served as a judge the following year. The camp was located in an educational institution. The classrooms were therefore all furnished with the three symbols that pervade the facilities of the Israeli educational system: the Israeli flag, a picture of Theodor Herzl, and a copy of the Declaration of Independence. The campers worked with their technological equipment in classrooms under these three symbols for the duration of the camp. On that same first day, as the megabytes and the gigabytes were being introduced to their work stations in the classrooms, Itay continued his pep talk.
Itay: You will do programming, and make no mistake, those of you who choose to do it, should know that it will be hard. It will be tough, but it will be rewarding in the end. And by the way, if it gets too hard, just look up. You see that guy? [He pointed at the picture of Herzl]. Who can tell me what he said? One of the campers: "If you will it, it is no dream" Itay: That's right, "If you will it, it is no dream." So, the next time something gets stuck, or there is a bug, or it gets too hard or too boring, or whatever, if it seems impossible, remember: you are literally, for the next month, living inside the impossible.
It was important for the organizers to emphasize that such talks had a considerable impact on the youngsters. The camp director's assistant insisted on showing me a video of the previous year's field trip to a high-tech company in TelAviv. He particularly wanted me to seean enthusiasticcamper who, on the way back to the bus, was shouting toward the camera: "Where else can you see this? Nowhere! Only here! Only here!" The following year I was introduced to an exceptionally gifted 15-year-old megabyte whohad chosen to manipulate a version of the Warcraft game series and to recreate, to the best of his knowledge, a computerized version of the battle of Masada with the Jews winning the battle. Two major discursive configurations and components which characterized the summer camp's jingoistic themes and ethnographic atmosphere also dominate other ethnographic sites of interest. The first is the rhetorical style epitomized in Itay's declaration of Israel's successes and contribution to present-day technology and human progress despite its generally inferior conditions. This claim is pervasive in many of the presentations of Israeli innovation in cyberspace, for example,the aforementioned
100 internet video on how to successfully boycott Israel and similar initiatives which strive to emphasize the irony that the West could be indebted to Israeli technology. Similarly, 11 of the 16 internet sites referring to creative technologies events (mostly upcoming professional exhibitions) that I reviewed made reference to Israeli achievements in the face of poor conditions in theirpresentation of Israel. It is also a theme in the "Did-You- Know" trivia section of the Ministry of Public Affairs and Diplomacy website76 where, for example, it is written:
Israel is one of the smallest countries in the world. India is 150 times larger, Alaska 70 times, Germany 16, Italy 13, England six, and Hungary four times larger. The percentage of Israelis holding registered patents is the highest in the world77. The second of these discursive configurations and components relates to symbols of Israeli nationalism such as the Israeli flag, the picture of Herzl, and the Declaration of Independence. These symbols, in line with Billig's (1995) definition of "banal nationalism,"often decorate many of the venues which host celebrations, displays, and exhibitions of creative technologies. For example, the final regional event in which the BeitNatan school competed was held in a science education center dedicated to the memory of a(n absent) soldier, a technology aficionado who died in battle. The shell of a combat plane is on permanent display in the courtyard. After the winners were announced, the parents of the deceased soldier got up on the stage, a short commemorative film was shown, and the ceremony ended with everybody singing Ha'Tikvah, the national anthem. in March 2011 I attended an exhibition in the field of medical technologies which took place in TelAviv. I befriended Moti, a bio-technology entrepreneur who was the coordinator and co-owner of the exhibition. I pointed out to him the (in my opinion) overabundance of Israeli flags decorating the entrance to the exhibition hall. Moti's response displayed the epitome of the bottom-up, proactive, and non-apologetic pairing of proud nationalism and Israel branding:
The people who come here, they're not idiots. I don't think you can come to Israel and not know where you are. All you have to do is watch the news every once in
76I find this rhetoric reminiscent of the discourse represented in the political banners of1930's Palestine, in which Gretz (1995) identified a three-stage recurring rhetorical process. The first stage portrays the distress of the (Jewish) people in their isolation against much stronger forces. The second stage describes an active reaction that is driven by faith and the organization of action that results in the third stage: victory. This rhetorical process is reproduced in the representation of the inferiority/success configuration of creativity and innovation in the official discourse promoted by state institutions, albeit in a somewhat altered version that primarily emphasizes the first and third stages.
77See similar examples on the Ministry of foreign affairs' website, in the section entitled "Economy: Challenges andachievements":http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/AboutIsrael/Economy/Pages/ECONOMY%20Challenges%20and%20A chievements.aspx
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a while, and believe me, when your money is at stake, you follow the news very closely. But it's good to give them a little reminder of where they are, and for us also, what it means to have this here – to have people coming from all over the world to this. I want everybody who walks through these doors to see the blue and white first, both Israelis and guests. This is a small reminder from me to them, if you like. It's not just about the start-up nation, it obviously is, of course, and it's very good for business, but it's also about the other things: the news, the past, and present. The sacrifices made. Besides, I personally think the colors blend beautifully with the exhibition itself.78
Similarly, in June 2010, I accompanied a delegation from a European ministry of commerce which washeaded by the minister of commerce himself. Among the numerous business appointments the minister attended throughout the afternoon, he also held a public conference attended by mid-level Israeli government representatives. After a speech emphasizing the importance of the economic relations between his country and Israel as a burgeoning locus of technological innovation (Israel was nevertheless not referred to as a"start-up nation"), he was given a gift by one of the Israeli representatives. The latter got up on stage, and after thanking the minister and referring to various aspects of the collaboration between the two countries, he declared, "We Jews look to our past in order to know where we're going," and presented the minister with a gift, a replica of a vase that "comes from the archeological site of TelZafit in the valley of Elah, about a 40 minute drive from here, where it is believed that David defeated Goliath." The Israeli official thus hinted at an overarching unproblematic and evencausal continuity between a past that refers to the secondary weakness-strength axis and an elitist present that informs the allegedly homogeneous cultural identity of Jews in their nation-stateand lookstoward the future. The European minister smiled politely, accepted the gift, and presented an exchange gift, a medal from his country. These ethnographic examples illustrate two common approaches to the connection between Israel's geopolitical inferiority, referred to through symbols lifted from the Zionist and Jewish cultural reservoir, and creative technological and entrepreneurial achievements. The first approach is exemplified in the summer camp and Israel's representations in cyberspace. In these cases, the official and unofficial agents of the nation-state bluntly assert Israel's "start-up" nation status through a hardline reading of Israel's geopolitical situation in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict: Israel is understood to be forever under threat and inherently inferiorand thus
78I could, in fact, appreciate Moti's last comment. In this particular exhibition, the medical whiteness that characterized much of the interior design alongside the touch of blue used on some of the stands bore a striking similarity to the aesthetics of the Israeli flag. This aspect of the exhibition brought an additional layer of ethno-national reference that Moti and his co-organizers were aiming at.
102 characterized by a justifiable paranoia. Alongside its small size and lack of natural resources, Israel's wars and existential plights, as obstacles in spite of which creativity was forged, cement its underdog status and make the nation-state's achievements shine brighter. These achievements designate Israel as a westernized contributor to afirst- world narrative of progress. The other approach, while being more subtle, nonetheless looks to capitalize on Israel's widely known geopolitical inferiority by way of symbolic insinuation. In the case of the minister, Israel's geopolitical situation and against-the- odds triumph is implied as a present-day reincarnation of (a future King) David overcoming Goliathan hardships in the context of entrepreneurial technology. In the case of the medical exhibition, Moti did not use the Israeli flag only to metonymically denote Israeli creative entrepreneurship and the start-up nation status but also to refer to Israel's history of geopolitical struggle, thus, in the context of the elitism-paranoia nexus (and the weakness-strength axis in particular) and the juxtaposition of hardship and achievement, signifying hardship per se.
Israel's Inferior Conditions from the Bottom-Up: Addressing Creative Superiority The sense of wonder that Israel's creative achievements seem to evoke in the previous top-down ethnography ran through all but one of the interviews I conducted (see the exception in Chapter 4). It was, undoubtedly, the primary and perhaps most prominent feature of the general attitude toward Israeli creativity as expressed privately by Israeli Jews, and in this sense, I identifiedit as rising from the bottom-up. One example isOded, a middle-aged entrepreneur who responded to my skepticism about the manufacturing of paper-thin television screens, a future Israeli technology in which he was involved (I remarked that it sounded impossible) and, echoing so manyof his peers, said:
Everything around you is impossible. Israel is impossible! We live in a hellhole, the far end of the world. How can a country like this, so burdened by wars, so messed up, produce such staggering numbers? It goes against reason, it goes against everything…I don't particularly like the word "miracles" but there's no other word for it. Had I been an investor and been presented with Israel's baggage, I would've run away, anyone would have. But here we are.
Contrasting Israel's Hawking-esque mind with its Hawking-esque body, Oded acknowledged Israel's achievements as miraculous (without ascribing it to the divine in any way). This miracle or marvel, which by definition involves an ultra-natural force (Shanafelt, 2004), recognizes Israel first and foremost as a geopolitically inferior country burdened by wars. In other words, similar to almost all other instances in which Israeli
103 high-tech is proclaimed a surprise in the public top-down presentation of Israeli creativity, Oded's interpretation too reflects a politically conservative discourse. When it came to discussing with my interviewees the explanation for both Israel's capacity and achievements, one of the most common explanations also referred to frailty and adversity, reaching back to the dark history of Jewish persecution which relates to paranoia and weakness.For example, when I asked Oded how the miracle (i.e.,Israel's creative exploits) came into being, he once again responded like his peers.:
When you ask yourself this question, you eventually come to ask yourself: Why haven't we (Jews) vanished from history? We certainly should have. But I think that this is precisely the thing, when you have such a history of being hunted and persecuted and killed, you eventually develop those senses. It sharpens your intelligence, you also develop an acute ability to anticipate new opportunities, to get around problems. You develop some sense of cunning.
Another entrepreneur, Yoav, raised similar claims about the Jewish (historical) ability or, conversely, cultural stereotype of "getting away with things."When we got to the subject of the Holocaust and I pointed out that the Jewish people didn't always "get away with things," he gave a stunningly provocative answer:
Look at the Holocaust…the ones who ultimately survived were the creative ones. The guy who managed to escape through the toilet or jump from the train or the person resourceful enough to lie convincingly to the Nazi officer. Those are the people who eventually came to this country. The Holocaust filtered out the non-creative of the Jewish population…and when they came here, to this neighborhood, do you think they had the luxury to stop thinking outside the box? To this day, they, that is we, don't have it.
Oded was referring to the near and distant past, concurring with the theoretical fascination with Jewish creativity as some form of de-theologized genius or notion of superiority,the "weapon of the weak," as referred to in Chapter 1. Such a weapon developeddue to marginality or Gentile persecution may be interpreted in several possible ways, be it a modernistic interpretation interchangeable with intellectual superiority, an unintellectual wily or competitive cunning (echoing anti-Semitic notions),or a historical pariah-paranoia status that has equipped the Jews with broad cultural tools for survival both economically and existentially.79In Oded's
79The connection between international or ethnic hostilities and Jewish creativity as involving cunning and craftiness is popularly acknowledged.This is expressly opposed to the theologized myth of the Jewish genius, whoseunequivocal enunciation is not only completely absent from officially endorsed top-down movements but also caused many interviewees to privately express confusion, uncertainty, ambivalence, or ontologies not meant to be rendered public. This is discussed in Chapter 4.
104 interpretation, persecution has a twofold meaning.It is a catalyst for creativity, especially creativity's reading as mental processes closely associated with heightened intelligence or cunning. In this sense, the Jewish people have selectively inherited across generations the tools which serve them to this day. At the same time, persecution is also construed as an obstruction before achievement.It serves to indicate that Jewish history has followed a surprising and abnormal course, as the predictable outcome of such relentless persecution should have been a "vanishing from history." The very act of surviving and thriving as a creative superpower should therefore be interpreted as miraculous and wondrous. Likewise, Yoav's provocative explanation connects persecution to creativity from a different perspective, according to which a particularly grim selective process has contributed to a surviving nation of refined creative capacities.80 Both interpretations recognize Israeli geopolitical inferiority as a present-day reincarnation of Jewish persecution. These informants, alongside several others,acknowledged continuity with the near past (as opposed to the ancient biblical past) and thereby contextualized the present Israeli elitism-paranoia nexus within an interpretation of Jewish history that is compatible with top-down conservative discourse. The paranoia and weakness of the past have contributed not only to past and present elitism but also to present-day strength. Persecution and inferiority, past and present, are construed as an attempt to validate the claim to heightened creative capacities, while providing a reasonable evolutionary explanation based on Jewish ontology of past misfortunes to account for the present. For both Oded and Yoav, more persecution means more creativity. In this sense, their approach to creativity resembles the one presented as part of the "creator-as-child" model, in which children's creativity is commonly perceived to evolve in relation to their inherent state of weakness in the face of adults. As mentioned, for both formal informants during interviews and casual informants, geopolitical inferiority was not necessarily connected to the Jewish past, but often served as a stand-alone explanation for achievements.In February 2015, I was sitting with a friend in a cafeteria at TelAviv University, telling him about the contents of this chapter. We were discussing the interconnectivity between nationalism, creativity, and play, and my friend said: "So, what you're saying is that the state somehow allows or encourages play in celebrations of creativity." Iwas just responding to this comment, when a young, geeky-looking student approached the table. Without introducing himself, he said:
80The argument that the Jewish genius (Jews who foresaw the danger and were able to escape Europe in time) has benefited statistically from the extermination of the rest of the population has been voiced before but vehemently refuted by various scholars (see Gilman,1996).
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Excuse me, but I overheard you talking and I couldn't help but interrupt. I just want to correct something;it's not that the state allows play or creativity, it's just that we have to be creative. We don't have any other choice. The alternative to creativity, in our region, in our circumstances, is just not to be. So, in creativity, there's no point in talking about allowing or encouraging anything. It's a matter of being versus not being.
This young student of electric engineering, who revealed that he was in fact referring to military-inclined creativity in various forms (namely technological superiority), expressed views (and emotions) I had heard very often both inside and outside the field. His views were similar to those expressed by Oded and Yoav, positioning creativity as the only thing separating existence from extinction and thus indirectly testifying to the Goliathan threats over Jews or Israel.In his case, however, while maintaining the continuity of causal principles in which creativity is evoked as a result of threats of annihilation, he shifted the focus from Jewish persecution to Israel's contemporary geopolitical inferiority. For him, technological elitism addresses Israel's paranoia and "fear of annihilation" (Shalit, 1994). Interestingly, the Arab threats to which most informants were obviously referring when alluding to the condition of "not being" were, for the most part, rarely mentioned by name. Furthermore, they perceived Israel, withits local military superpower status,as a nation in need of creative defense against mostly brutaland also, presumably, non-creative attacks. The creative technology that Israel uses against its enemies and its consequences, namely, the act of perpetrating an attack, was never directly mentioned. There were also other cases in which members of the creative community refrained from explicitly naming the Arabs as the enemy. In 2011, I attended a conference on the theme of clean energy. One of the most popular panels in this conference, especially among the English-speaking visitors, dealt with "the world's dependency on oil." One of the entrepreneurs who got up to speak presented his electric- based project which offered the possibility of reducing the consumption of oil. The entrepreneur explained, in English, the various disadvantages of oil dependency, focusing first on ecological issues. He then went on, delivering the following lines with a blend of slight discomfort and bemused hesitance: "well, and of course, another important reason for reducing the consumption of oil is that…well, sometimes…the…the money we pay to the countries who supply oil…these countries....some of them…the money sometimes goes to activities we don't want to support." As an improvisational theater actor, I couldn't help thinking that the speaker's slightly exaggerated endearing awkwardness in this part of his speech, his body language, posture, pauses, and attempt to share a knowing smile with the audience, may have been "scripted" in his attempt to avoid saying the term terrorism (instead he said
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"activities we don't want to support") and Arab countries ("the countries"). Regardless of whether the absence of these words was intentional or not, they clearly signify the present of the absent.The enmity between Israel and the Arabs and the conflict as an existential and political risk is thus downplayed but nonetheless present, and in many speech acts on creativity the absence hovers explicitly at, and the idea that creative technologies will "save" Israel from Arab threats is presented by substitutive linguistic means. The absence of Arabs from creativity as a domain of knowledge and from the field of creative technologies in particular, was, for the most part, made clear by the very physical absenceof Arabs in those events. However, in the rare cases where Arabs were present,the sense of suspicion and fear was palpable. In May 2012, for example, I drove to an exclusive unconference in the city of Nazareth.I was asked by the organizers to take three other participants with me in my car: a woman named Yael and two men, Daniel and Amnon. We arrived in Nazareth around noon, and Daniel proposed having lunch in downtown Nazareth, the Arab part of the city. Amnon agreed instantly, but Yael seemed more reluctant and preferred climbing up to the venue of the unconference. The three of us eventually convinced Yael to stay. I parked the car, and we went looking for a restaurant. Wandering through the busy and crowded streets,Yael grew increasingly nervous and uncomfortable. At some point, she thought that a group of passing teenagers had made some kind of a sexually offensive remark toward her. She asked to go back to the car, but Daniel and Amnon reassured her that everything was alright. Daniel even joked saying whimsically thatin case of emergency, backup could be called down from the unconference. We continued to walk around, but I felt that Yael was too stressed, and eventually I offered to accompany her to the hotel. We decided that Daniel and Amnon would remain in the city and join us later by taxi. Later, at the unconference, in a patio overlooking the Nazareth skyline, Yael came over, apologized for what she called "a damsel in distress scenario", and thanked me for not having been a "macho asshole." The incident was not mentioned again. Yael's tension and fear demonstrates the threat of the Arab "other" played in the Israeli imagination. It uncovers the hidden tensions around the exclusion of the Arab citizens from the concept of "Jewish or Israeli creativity" and the "start-up nation" or, at the very least, their rarity (only four Arab- Israeli entrepreneurs from the area participated in this specific unconference which was attended by 200 people).Even when these tensions do emerge, as in the above episode, they are quickly erased, as is the Arabs' presence.
In many informal conversations, another response, which earned its place alongside the explanation of Jewish-Israeli creative capacities and achievements as relating to persecution and armed conflicts, referred to Israel's lack of natural resources. "We are creative because we don't have oil or water" was a claim I often heard at agricultural
107 exhibitions (oil is not a natural Israeli resource but is virtually synonymous with many Arab countries). Creativity as the answer to Israel's lack of natural deposits in contrast to its oil-rich neighboring countries, thus invoking, to some extent, a nature/culture dichotomy, is of paramount importance not only as a reference to Zionist pioneering myths and thinking-outside-the-box practices but also as one aspect of what I call "defiance of nature." "Defiance of nature" characterizes many public celebrations of creativity elaborated on below, but first I refer to it in its most straightforward manner insofar as Zionism is concerned: Israel's lack of natural resources. I met Sigal, a 27 year-old woman, in one of the creativity enhancing workshops Ziv and I gave (this time to a group of amateur improvisational theatre actors). At the end of the workshop, Sigal came up to me and asked, since I had introduced myself as a researcher in the field of Israeli creativity, whether I would like to hear her story about promoting Israeli creativity abroad. The next day she emailed me a short story named "Tziv'onit" (meaning tulip or colorful). In this semi-humorous story, Sigal, portraying herself as naïve and anxious, recounted her experiences in an intimidating networking event in the field of renewable energy in Houston in 2009. In the following excerpt,Sigal tells of her unpreparedness:
And so, I arrived at the conference before being acquainted with the rules of the game. I thought I would show uplike in Israel, just a little bit dressed up, and I wore this elegant purple dress, flat shoes, and a little bit of make-up (what the hell was I thinking?!). I knew very few people there. I tried to blend in.They call this sort of thing a networking event. "What's the problem?," I thought. I am pretty, nice, and sociable, so what on earth could go wrong? I stood by a group of people, nodding and faking understanding, offering my business card, which they didn't take (and didn't offer theirs). I tried another group and another one, but it was obvious that I was an outsider: a purple dress, young, and short – what a mistake! Why didn't I realize that here you're supposed to wear a suit, you're supposed to wear diamonds and put on make-up until your face is fully painted. Here there is virtually nothing but men who are all tall, and if I didn't want to be towered over, I should at least be in high heels so I could look at them as close in the eye as possible. In retrospect, everybody there was "old money," George W. Bush style, but less nice, a lot less nice…and they were only interested in how much money I had, how many diamonds I was wearing, and what I was wearing, and in general, it seemed that attitude and age counted a lot more than a smile or vitality. Those people, who didn't understand me, thought that I was some cute81 secretary, sent by arrogant bosses like themselves. And then came my panel…there I was, sitting by the table, again among old, fat, and bored men who couldn't stop talking about the price of a barrel in the 1970s and the
81The original text has the word "tziv'onit" here, but "cute" seemed a more accurate translation in this context.
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1980s and the trends in the 2000s. They put me in the furthest corner, and I kept smiling politely. It was better to shut up as I didn't know how many liters of oil there are in a barrel, how much a liter of oil costs,or what the hell a gallon is, and since I was already there, it was better to stay pretty and not to add the dubious compliment of being "dumb." In her story's climax, Sigal is finally asked by the panel's moderator to express Israeli views on the current oil crisis. Recognizing her moment to shine, she addresses the panel and says: Well, I was sitting in the back wondering, what the hell was God thinking when he put all the oil in one place, all the water in another place,all the land for agriculture in a different place, and none in the Holy Land. (Sigal pauses to commend herself on the courage to attract attention through a whimsical joke mentioning God and hell in the same sentence in the company of fairly conservative people and continues.) God must've had some sense about what he was doing, so I was thinking some more about what has happened in Israel over the last 60 years. We did not have oil, so we started using solar energy, and every house in Israel has used it for heating water since the 1970s; and we don’t have water, so we became world leaders in desalination and 1/3 of the fresh water in Israel comes from the desalination of seawater; and we don’t have land for agriculture, so we developed greenhouses and became leaders in that field as well. (Sigal pauses again to get ready for her coup de grâce.) Look at Israel compared to Texas, look how many start-up companies and new technologies we have considering how small we are. Maybe it all means that sometimesnot having much makes you creative in developing new solutions and new technologies. Sometimes, by being surrounded with nothing, you have more creativeness, and this actually generates your true growth! (Sigal congratulates herself on a job well done as the listeners gather around her to continue the discussion).
In her story, Sigal implicitly contrasted other worry-free regions to Israel, referred to Israeli achievements, and underlined creativity (which, by being compared to Israel's size, relates directly to the theme of miraculousness) as an answer to a lack of natural resources. She called forth the mythical status of the pioneering and conquering (by cultivation) of the desolate emptiness of the land in Zionist narratives –"making the desert bloom" – while reaffirming Israel's status as a westernized technological enclave in an uncivilized wasteland. Furthermore, creativity is equated with the axiom that "necessity is the mother of invention." Suitably proactive and anthropogenic, the explanation relating to the lack of resources, while sharing with approaches that emphasize the conflict's basic premise of a had-to-become-creative response to harsh external conditions, differs from the latter in several respects. First, by limiting herself to the Israeli present and near-past and avoiding the conflict (at least
109 formally), Sigal separated Jewish misfortune from Israeli achievement and offered a narrative of national creativity which is not especially Jewish. Second, by emphasizing proactivity, especially in the context of facing and successfully overcoming forces of nature, her explanation can be seen as a discursive rendition of practices of the"defiance of nature" in celebrations of creativity in the public sphere, as presented below. Following the indirect references by both Oded and Yoav to the vulnerability of the child, Sigal's story also illuminates several aspects of the "creator-as-child" model, as she gives her personal account of overcoming a struggle to be noticed and taken seriously. In Sigal's narrative, she contrasts with her adversaries in terms of gender, age, appearance, naïveté, and demeanor. She depicts her own vitality, goodheartedness, and fresh and defiant outlook on the subjectsat hand in sharp contrast to her counterparts' static and stagnated fields of interest. According to the "creator-as-child" model, children may be derided in the world of adult-like seriousness, but they are nevertheless the bearers of fresh and innovative thought, carrying the seed of creative superiority and elitism.I have heard similar themes echoed in the self-deprecating wit of various creators, whose adoption of a village idiot self-image marked by foolishness and inexperience served them well and set the stage for their impressive creativity. This theme also dominates the Israeli state narrative,starting with the miraculous story of creation which is often credited to the pioneers' youthful exuberance rebelling against parental diasporic docility. In other words, Israel's young age, like Sigal's, is an inherent part of its (geopolitical) inferiority;its prominence among more mature nations (or irreverence toward the category of adults) is celebrated as part of Jewish-Israeli creativity. The pounding positive resonance of the "struggle, agency, and resistance" root metaphor was heard in all of my interviews.
Israel and the "Defiance of Nature" The "defiance of nature" is creativity's additional meaning in a modernistic cosmology, coping successfully and creatively with a lack of natural resources is one example. During fieldwork, mostly in professional exhibitions, my attention was often caught by the rhetoric used in the advertisements hung above the various stands; for example, an ad for a night-vision device tempted the potential buyer to "Turn Night into Day," an innovative irrigation system offered to "Grow More Crop Per Drop," while a greenhouse improvement made the ambitious promise to "Control Your Weather." During unconferences, I was exposed to similar attempts, such as a pill that could alter taste buds making sour fruits taste momentarily sweet. In another "smart and useless" event, a participant attempted (unsuccessfully) to devise a toy car that would stick to the ceiling and run along it without falling. In many unconferences, there were talks about science- fiction like technologies such as transhumanist aspirations or the ability in the near
110 future to command programmable materials. The creative act –for which Sapir (1924) proposed a modernist-inspired definition as a "bending of form to one's will" (cited in Lavie et al., 1993, p.5) – reveals its anthropogenic essence, ever involving some degree of the subjugation of nature to human will. A new invention brings with it change, control, and modification of the natural order of things by human agency.82 In the first part of this chapter, drawing on Stack and Callahan's (2007) distinction between "flux" and "focus" as modes of creativity, I analyzed unconferences and more festival-like events as the former. I now refer to the creative "defiance of nature" and its attending public celebrations of creativity as focus modeevents. Focus mode generally refers to competitions, exhibitions, and conferences and, in contrast to flux mode, refers to the creator's focus on the creative task at hand, characterized by a controlled disengagement from the distractions of the wider world.83Focus mode highlights innovation and technology and, in contrast to flux mode, involves little or no play.It is far more methodical and denotes performative renditions and institutionalization (through practices of celebration) of the Jewish-Israeli elitism-paranoia nexus from which the theme of miraculousness emanates fairly straightforwardly. Focus mode moves away from the purposefully confounded categories of "adults,""creators," and "children" in the "creator-as-child" model toward more hierarchical and pedagogical relations. I nowpresent and analyze two detailed ethnographic examples. Various annual contests of young inventors and entrepreneurs include a competitive category of technological excellence (a field tangential to innovation in the Israeli educational system). In June 2011, I observed an annual competition within one particular network of Israeli schoolsthat represented the culmination of a year's work. It took place across the entire first floor of one of the schools, each class evaluating competitors presenting various projects and inventions within different fields (mechanics, biotechnology, social entrepreneurship, and innovation). I was welcomed by the event coordinator, who decided to take me, to, among others, a technological excellence competition in the architecture category. There were 20 11th and 12th graders in the classroom(aged 17–18) from schools throughout the country, teamed up in pairs, as well as several teachers, a TV film crew, and a task coordinator who walked around the teams. The topic of the contest was HomaUmigdal.84 The students were given assignment sheets with a blurred (and
82Several writers have been more explicit about the relations between nature/culture and technology. For example, Grundmann (1991) wrote that "according to Marx, humankind's existential situation is characterized by the fact that it has to live simultaneously in and against nature. This is to say that people must stay in contact with nature to survive (food, shelter and so forth), but they also transform nature for their purposes by means of technology" (p.108). 83Despite treating those events as analytically separated, I am not referring to flux and focus as mutually exclusive. Many creativity events are neither fully in flux nor focus mode but rather are hybrid spaces or encompass both, with one kind often offering a smaller session of the other within itself. 84A Zionist trope referring to a clandestine tactic of settlement during the period of the Arab revolt (1936–1939) in which Jewish settlers built the basic infrastructure of a settlement (consisting of a stockade [homa] and a tower [migdal]) overnight to avoid daytime Arab attacks and to overcome British Mandate restrictions prohibiting new settlements.
111 therefore uncopyable) picture of a tower and were asked to use thin sticks to build a tower that had a platform with a watch post on top of it. With the watch post removed, the tower had to be able to bear a brick weighing about two kilograms. The students were given limited time for the task, thus simulating the conditions of the original HomaUmigdal pioneers. The pairs began building their towers, each testing the durability of the tower with a brick. After the towers were built, the studentsdispersed, returning about twenty minutes laterwith family members and friends for the actual contest. Each pair was invited to place a growing number of bricks on top of their tower,the winner being the tower that supported the most bricks. The addition of a third and fourth brick defeated all of the towers but two, resulting in loud cheers and cries of excitement as the more resistant towers revealed themselves to the spectators. While it was clear that one of the towers had reached its limit, the last one seemed able to hold even more. "Put on the fifth! Put on the fifth!," cried the students to the pair who were about to win. The teacher gave a nod of approval, the agitated spectators calmed down, and the pair carefully placed another brick. The subsequent applause and cheers filling the room acknowledged the fact that there was something irrational and unnatural about the sight of the fragile wooden sticks supporting each other and managing to hold the clumsy and crude 10-kilo mass. "Another one!," urged the crowd, but this time the teacher did not give in to popular demand and began removing the bricks from the tower, left standing as the victor and sole survivor of the competition.
The HomaUmigdal competition (photos by YoelTawil). June 2011.
In focus events, such as this,the event is predicated on a set of rules within which the participants, presented with a challenge which must be worked out creatively, are expected to achieve an evaluable and recognizable semblance of success. Such a success is organic to a modernistic mode in which the desired solution is functionally viable and applicable. In this particular example, participants advanced through a linear process, following the same steps of construction and testing and eventually taking the construct to its limits, with the creative talent embedded in the choices of mechanical support that the creators decided the sticks would give one another. This linear progression was punctuated by one fixed, non-spontaneous, and clearly evaluated type of peak
112 experience, socially designated as such by cheers and applause every time an additional brick was placed on the construct, concluding when only the one tower was left standing alone in its uniqueness. The competition celebrated the hidden strength of a prime Zionist trope's visible frailty and constructed the peak experience by gradually coming as close as possible to the point when the tower's resistance was pushing against the boundaries of its apparent natural capacity, thereby producing a nature-defying impression. As disengaged from the wider world's distractions and as concentrated on the task at hand as the competitors may have been, there is no denying the wider cultural context of the seemingly technical task. The premise of underlying paranoia-weakness, inherent in the Zionist ethos, pervaded the competition through the very conditions of the task, and its subjugationwas manifested in the structured series of peak experiences. The final and most powerful peak experience occurred when the final winning tower and its young creators transcendedthe perceived boundaries, surpassing all expectations. The tower metonymically implies Israel by publicly reenacting the tension at the core of the theme of miraculousness, through which the "weakness" aspect of the nation- state/stick-tower, due to its apparent physical frailty, is employed to create a much lower normalcy starting point from which the tower's robustness would start to impress. It is from here that the "strength" aspect, which owes much to the mental processes and creative decisions (as opposed to brute force) of the creators, may be extrapolated, emphasized, and eventually celebrated. Israel is thereby declared to be unique and improbable in its past, present, and future miraculous resilience. The competition entailed both the glorification of the Zionist pioneering past as a successful endeavor and the assertion of the superiority of creativity and technical prowess over much stronger,natural, and brutal circumstances, however frightening they may be. The second example refers toa presentation by the Space-IL team competing in the Google Lunar-X prize contest that took place in an "intelligent bar" gathering in TelAviv.85In this specific gathering,Itamar, one of the founding members of the Space- IL team, was scheduled to speak. This was the third time I would be meeting a member of the Space-IL team but the first time outside of an unconference. This was May 2012, close to Israel’s Independence Day, and all the lectures were related to the national context, for example, a hummus joint owner was speaking about the characteristics of the Israeli customer and a social entrepreneur was speaking about her project of social empowerment through fashion design in southern Israel. When it was his turn, Itamar, who was significantly older than the average age of the audience, got up on stage, explained the project, clarified its educational goal of promoting youth interest in science and technology, and presented short vide oclips of the hitherto simulations and experiments (the less successful involving different explosions, which gota few laughs
85"Intelligent bar" gatherings are public events held in bars in which lectures are given on various popular subjects.
113 from the audience). Suddenly, a devilish smile appeared on Itamar's face,and he advanced a provocative claim: "Does anybody know that all the satellites circle the planet in one direction, except for one group of satellites, the Israeli ones, which go in the opposite direction?" With this, Itamar had captured the audience's attention. He went on:
People once asked an Israeli space agency executive for an explanation, and he replied that it is because Hebrew is written from right to left. But that's not the reason.[He laughed.] The best way of launching a satellite is in the direction of the earth's rotation, toward the east. That's the direction all the world's satellites are launched. The real reason that Israel cannot launch their satellite in that direction is because if the launch is not successful, it might land in places we don't want it to. Therefore, we have to launch it towards the west, and for that we need more energy; the technology has to be more powerful and the materials have to be lighter, and all these have to be researched and developed, and that's our advantage.86
Space-Il's 2013 Passover card posted on social media. March 2013 Itamar was referring to the narrative of Israeli weaknessas a limitation that doesn't allow for the easier course of action that goes with the flow of nature, represented here by the launching of a satellite according tothe earth's rotation. Israel is handicapped by being surrounded by enemies and is forced to overcome this limitation if it wants to facilitate space activity. Typical of focus mode events, the most powerful single peak experience of the celebration of creativity lies in the creative problem-solving of a challenge; in this case,scientific-technological creativity anchored in the need to find
86This information was corroborated by a response to a mail I sent to Israel's space agency shortly after the event. 114 alternative solutions for the reduction of weight and improvement of the driving force of satellites, resulting in Israel's singularity in launching satellites into orbit from a unique direction. The Jewish-Israeli weakness, resulting from persecution and geopolitical acrimony, and the fear of losing highly secretive technology that may fall in enemy territory necessitates novel ideas that are manifested in creative solutions and technological innovativeness. The successful past, present, and future launches, intensified by the operatic grandeur of space, endow Israel with a surprising level of ambition and defianceeven in the face of the very laws of nature. Itamar's words provided yet another public permutation of the Jewish-Israeli narrative of wondrous "defiance of nature." This direct connection between the "defiance of nature" and Israel is rare in flux events as the presence of the nation-stateis rarely officially enforced by organizers of unconferences. Participants, however, do sometimes engage with Israel and Israeliness as it relates to the specific events. In the Birdbrain unconference mentioned in Part 1of this chapter, Tomer, a member of the geek community, enthused by a dance workshop he'd just left, said to me:
So many talented people squeezing into one small place, what does that remind you of? Welcome to mini-Israel, the crazy country! A millionaire here, a genius right there, all within spitting distance, all approachable – it's very Israeli. Being able to refer to the smartest guys in the world, who you don't necessarily know, by their first name, is Israeli to me. You've got the best and brightest minds in the world here, just fooling around, dressingup, and letting their minds run free. Does that seem normal to you? That's why it's so amazing. To me, this is a kind of reality hacking.
Intrigued by the term "reality hacking," I asked Tomer what he meant. He replied:
It's giving the finger to the world. Refusing the 9 to 5 job and choosing to do creative and amazing things instead is hacking reality. Being stubborn enough to do what you want to do and pursuing your dream in spite of what anyone might say about you failing and so on. Israel is also hacking reality; it's the dream of a few crazy guys.
Powered by the event's vitality as demonstrated in his own peak experiences, Tomer recast the aspiringly transnational entrepreneurial event as a small-scale Israel, projecting its culture of informality and ferment as a positive anomaly, characteristic of Jewish-Israeli culture. Israel is, according to him, anabnormal or unnatural concentration of top talent that refuses conformity. Both Israel and the people said to metonymically represent it are an elite. Both are positioned across and above a certain
115 worldwide norm of mediocrity from which they differ, despite sharing similar interests. Tomer used the word "hacking" neither in its original meaning of computerized civil disobedience nor in its interpretation, among high-tech geeks, of collaborative computer jamming but rather as an heroic, risk-taking, Schumpeterian rebelliousness against conformists, visionless, and possibly hostile nay-saying masses, which succeeds in realizing impossible dreams. Tomer also made two implicit references to the "creator-as-child" model. First, his "hacking" bears a similarity to the defiance aspect of the model, as Tomer, in his stubbornness and disregard of what others may think, refuses a patently adult trope –the oppressive and dull conventionality embedded in the "9 to 5 job" – and instead chooses "the creative" which is synonymous with "the amazing." Second is the willingness of bright minds to engage in frivolity and play, which Tomer sees as antithetical to rationality and which resonates with the absence of ordinariness in his reading of Israel's creation. These two references relate to the theme of miraculousness: Israel, as a successful entrepreneurial endeavor against all odds, "hacks" and transcends the reality of life, which is governed by a regime characterized by the normalcy of natural law that is demonstrated at the geopolitical level for a collective and in the labor market for the individual. This regime is subsequently disobeyed and disrupted by both Israelis or Israel. In other words, just as the unconference defies nature by defying normalcy, so too does Israel.
Discussion Hallam and Ingold (2007) quoted Boden's (1990) statement that creativity is often defined through its unpredictability or surprise value. The concept of miraculousness discussed herein relies on the amplification of unpredictability through the contrasting manifestation of creativity in improbable places;for example, Israel's creativity,as both a top-down and bottom-up movement, is most often presented as statistically improbable, and Israel's achievements are said to exist despite the dictates of common sense. For a theoretical coordinate relating to the ethnography presented concerning Israel's inherent geopolitical inferiority, I hold fast to my deconstructionist convictions that strive to reveal the cultural interweaving of discourses that may appear as some kind of self-evident "truth" but from a historical and political perspective. I refer specifically to White's (1973) concept of emplotment, in which he contended that any historical narrative is in fact an argumentative emplotment favoring the inclusion, accentuation, and linkage of some events over others in the creation of a coherent tale. Based on the ethnography, I identified five interwoven rhetorical devices in the creation of the emplotment of miraculousness.
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1. Israel's mighty achievements are frequently displayed in contrast toits difficult circumstances, such as itssmall size, lack of natural resources, and security challenges (interpreted mostly as impediments to creativity), and thus they appear all the more triumphant. 2. The use of numbers and statistical data to enframe both inferiority (such as Israel's size) and achievements (such as Israel's "staggering numbers") in events and interviews enlists a discursively approved accuracy of quantitative data to negotiate Israel's creative achievements as both enormous and indisputably real.This follows Christophers (2007) who, when writing about the governmental measurement of the creative industries in the United Kingdom, used Mitchell's (1988) concept of enframing to explain the use of statistical data to attain certain ends: In producing objects (maps, data, and so on) in such a way as to emphasize both their accurate mirroring of, but also their ontological distance from, a prior material reality (which they merely represent), enframing creativity such as cartography and statistics acquire an extraordinary sense of certainty (p. 421). 3. I follow Foucault's suggestion of taking into account not only what is being said but also what is being omitted (Ahl, 2007). This also refers to absence, but to absent knowledge and, specifically, to complexity.All of the achievements mentioned (which are limited only to successes) are presented as being of entirely Israeli origin. These public presentations and references are therefore marked by the absence of allusion to issues that havebenefited Israeli creativity historically, such as a heavily state-supported industrial-military complex, globalization, immigration,overseas funding,transnational intellectual cross-pollination, and cooperation, as mentioned in Chapter 1. It would therefore seem that the same factors that originally catalyzed Israeli creativity are either ignored or discursively reinterpreted only as obstacles (namely Israel's military-industrial complex and security challenges) that needed to be overcome. 4. By mentioning various inventions side-by-side, an alternative genealogy is implied, a logical or even causal association between inventions that were not necessarily connected in any particular way and are now hinted at being genealogically linked as the prolific outcome of a certain unitary creative dynamic:for example, the USB flash drive – developed in the intelligence-industrial complex – and the cherry tomato. These products and exhibits are implied to be material manifestations of a miraculously competent genius. 5. An emplotment is being co-created in a bottom-up fashion (in other words, in response to a top-down stimulus) as can be seen in:the verbal exchanges between the participants in the summer camp shortly after Itay's welcome speech; Moti's expectation that the visitors to the medical exhibition were aware of the Israeli flag's multivocality; and the inclination of several informantsto explain the Israeli miracle
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of creativity with leitmotifs which relate to Jewish persecution, wars, or a lack of resources as causes and sources of creativity. In these instances, many subjects tended to (or were expected to) organize dispersed or incomplete information according to chronology and importance and to complement what they had seen or heard with further associations of which they had become aware. In other words, whenever Israeli creativity is presented throughout the field by various agents representing, supporting, or agreeing with the state narrative, the presentation entails a scattershot format of typically evocative and appropriate trivia. The "missing" pieces of the puzzle that the participants have been indirectly obliged to remember and the linkage that they have consequently been impelled to form invite them to become amateur historiographers and engage in historical bricolage. They match what they are being told and shown with key cultural symbols of which most are likely aware, and they overlook others,eventually embellishing and linearly reorganizing a pre-existing top-down narrative of victorious transcendence of hardshipthat largely corresponds with and builds on the abundance of key cultural symbols in the Jewish and Zionist historical reservoir. These five rhetorical strategies that shape the public discourse's illustrated historiography of creativity, both popular and officially endorsed, construct Jewish- Israeli creativity as real and undisputed, springing from a unified ethno-national capacity of a cultural collective, miraculously triumphant in spite of geopolitical frailty and personally shared and validated.In White's (1973) terms, the mode of ideological implication of this narrative can be identified as conservative, meaning that the mode of emplotment is a militantly romantic one;it is a drama of self-identification symbolized by the heroic transcendence of the world of experience, a triumph of good over evil, virtue over vice, light over darkness. It is also the answer of elitism and strength to paranoia and weakness.This message of militant and miraculous transcendence is reiterated in the focus mode events which acknowledge, both in performance and in discourse, Israel's ethno-national invincibility that ostensibly defies the laws of nature and normalcy. Finally, the focus events lead to two additional interconnected points of discussion, one relates to their attitude toward children andthe other the politicization of creativity as an ethno-national theme. First, the pedagogical nature of the two focus ethnographic instances (as well as the summer camp whose technological activities operated largely in focus mode) elicits a comparison between focus and flux events insofar as their relations to children are concerned. In contrast to flux events, in which the "creator-as- child" model equates creativity with various attributes of children and childhood such as defiance, disobedience, play, and folly and invites a collapse of the boundaries between the categories of children and adults, focus events relegate children to a more conservative locus but without losing sight of their cultural centrality. In focus mode,
118 which is more characteristic of the interpretation and presentation of creativity as a problem-solving endeavor performed by professionals, the child is present not as a creator or a "mind" in an adult's body but as a recipient of enculturation practices. The creators, teacher, evaluators, supervisors, and speakers may be seen as creators for (or of) the child. They are connected to the "creator-as-child" model in the sense that in spite of the relative separation between the categories of adults and children, the former continues to imbue the latter with the themes that pervade the realm of Jewish-Israeli creativity. This is done either through practical enculturation and technological education or through motivational inspiration relating to nationalism, entrepreneurship, innovation, and creativityas well as imagination, interest in technology, and tenacity more generally. Through these, the child is groomed to become a creator or invited to partake in the celebration of nationally-inclined creative achievements. In addition to the activities of formal education, I have heard from many creators in the field about the importance of work with and for future generations from kindergarten to university; Menny, who volunteers at BeitNatan,is an example of this work in informal education. In sum, even when not a creator as such, the child is an integral partof the creativity effort model and remains a central figure in this public discourse. The second point of discussion which emerges from focus events is their clear, linear, pedagogical, and, above all, performative aspectswhich express the historiography that tells of the miraculous and transcendental triumph over the inherent geopolitical weakness of the Israeli nation-state more powerfully than flux events. Especially in educational contexts, focus events embody through performance a certain politicization of creativity and innovation, whenever the concept of creativity is directly associated with subjects relating to the nation-state's survival. In addition to the discursive historiography they recount, these events indicate this politicization and reveal their institutionalization and possible enlistment as a tool of political persuasion – a consolidation of nationalism. This politicization is, according toWright (1998):
An attempt by identified agents to redefine key symbols which give a particular view of the world, of how people should be and behave and what should be seen as the "reality" of their society and history: in short, an ideology.(p. 9) In this particular case, the definition refers to the enlistment of creativity and innovation into the Jewish-Israeli elitism-paranoia nexus which both reaffirms the bleak constitutive concepts in Jewish-Israeli collective culture mentioned in Chapter 1 ("siege mentality," "fear of annihilation,""few versus many") and, at the same time, counters them, providing a hopeful prognosis for the survival of the nation-state and its ethnos. In this regard, the theme of Israeli miraculousness, immersed in the context of a predominantly Western, ever-growing interest in commercialized creativity and
119 innovation, constitutes a glocalized response to processes in which globalized cultural items are redefined by a local, culture-specific (but not inherent) response (Hannerz, 2002; Tomlinson, 1999). Here specifically, the fascination with creativity and innovation as a global conceptual cultural item undergoes an adaptation that, in Geertz's (1973b) terms, is both a model of and a model for the nationalist political agenda of the host culture;it affirms that technological elitism was (and is) underlain by paranoia and creative strength by weakness. This emphasis on Israel's miraculous elitism and strength corresponds with the theoretical roadmap ofcreativity's positiveness mentioned in Chapter 2with particular referenceto the two root metaphors: "modernism and capitalism" and "struggle, agency, and resistance." The former, which played a somewhat diminished role in the "creator- as-child" model, patently informs this face of Jewish-Israeli creativity's frontstage, as Israel's miraculousness is synonymous with an allegedly unexpected concentration of creative entrepreneurial activity and production of technology. This activity is set against the backdrop of the latter root metaphor: a conservative reading of Israel's creation and ongoing existence as forever threatened and inherently weak, engulfed in anever-ending struggle that harks back to the Jewish past. In that past, the Jewish ethnos is marked as having a flair for and a history of resistance. Israel's successful and heroic present-day struggle, whose means are largely provided by the modernist-capitalist domain, relates directly to these two promoters of creativity's positiveness and infuses the public sphere with hope, wonder,and a heightened sense of power.
Conclusion: Childlikeness and Miraculousness
In this chapter, I discussed the presentation of Jewish-Israeli creativity in the public sphere as well as the perceived origins, attributes, and conditions for its enhancement which are publicly shared and generally agreed on by creators. I presented two major themes– childlikeness and miraculousness – that run through this publicly shared discursive system and entertain a dialectical relationship with both the elitism- paranoia nexus and with positiveness. Children are related to creativity in several respects.They are, first and foremost, the benefiters of the creative act, as many creators see themselves as working for the benefit of future generations in some way or another.Their connection is also evident inthe perceived association of creativity and creative technologies with silliness, humor, and frenetic or unconventional thought (play), which enables a combination of all of them and is epitomized in the US-sourced globalized unconference format, here identified as a bottom-up, "by-the-people and for-the-people" phenomenon. Furthermore, in the creators' personal narratives of creativity,they often referred to themselves metaphorically as children and located the onset of their creativity in
120 childhood,often as a form of defiance against the world of adults or as a childlike helplessness in the face of hardships and challenges which are subsequently overcome. In sum, my "creator-as-child" model refers to a shared phenomenology, uniting creators around themes of weakness, disobedience, freshness and vitality, defiance, lack of discipline, and play. At the state level, I reviewed and analyzed the theme of miraculousness (top- down and bottom-up) which refers to the discourses and practices that shape and legitimize the ethno-national narrative of Jewish-Israeli creativity as a wondrous and miraculous transcendence of Jewish historical weakness and Israel's geopolitical vulnerability. I showed that the public configuration of Jewish-Israeli creativity generates a sense of awe through the selective sampling and interpretation of various events lifted from the Jewish and Zionist historical reservoir and emplotted within a narrative of heroic, even romantic, obstacle-surmounting transcendence. This is achieved by never acknowledging elitism without mentioning paranoia or, in other words, by contrasting creative exploits,especially in the field of creative technology,with Israel's geopolitical frailty. In addition, I argued that the theme of miraculousness is manifested in events that celebrate Israeli technology and creativity and in performances of "defiance of nature" that attribute credibility to the idea that Israel's creation and ongoing existence contradict supposed geopolitical natural laws. These discourses and practices highlight the political dimensions surrounding miraculousness; this inherently multivocal symbol is reframed as a signifier of either strength or weakness alongside a conservative reading of the Jewish-Israeli elitism- paranoia nexus, and this is institutionalized in the practices of its celebration. The concepts of creativity and innovation may thus become a tool of political persuasion of Jewish-Israeli nationalism and of nationalistic neoliberalism. These two major themes, the "creator-as-child" model and miraculousness, are discursively interconnected. Throughout this chapter, I elaborated on three leitmotifs raised by various interviewees regarding Israel's creative capacities and their construal as extraordinary: Israeli childlike lack of discipline, Israel's inherent geopolitical inferiority, and Israel'slack of natural resources. All three were strongly expressed in a deliberately unapologetic fashion, both publicly and privately, by many informants, thus suggesting that their explanatory value occupies a firm and central place in the frontstage of Jewish-Israeli creativity. Lack of discipline relates to the "creator-as-child"model and has been acknowledged as inherent to the Israeli national character. Israel's inherent inferiority and lack of resources relate to the theme of miraculousness, as they refer to the evolution of creativity in the difficult conditions and unfavorable circumstances of Jewish history and Israel's creation and ongoing state-building that I refer to generally as paranoia. Concerning inferiority in particular, an ethno-nationalist inclination may be emphasized, according to which Israel's geopolitical inferiority is sometimes
121 recognized as a present-day reincarnation of (meta-)historical persecutions endured by the Jews. All three leitmotifs share the same related abstractions: weakness, defiance, audacity, innovation, unruliness, and play. The last is, strongly related to weakness in the sense that it is performed either by a weak child or by an adult in a much-needed protective context. The leitmotifs and the two major themes they represent converge with personal phenomenological accounts of creativity in both the form and content of creative discourse and practice. Both miraculousness and childlikeness share a similar logic of means-ends and cause-and-effect relationships, in other words, a miraculous or amazing creative activity originates in an act of defiance that overcomes a certain weakness. Subsequently, Israel's wondrous creative achievements and the qualities needed in order to be creative are both mutually validating and mutually defining and are understood within a single explanatory system. The ethno-national and the personal converse and mutually reinforce each other;creators may relate personally to the widespread explanatory interpretations of Israeli creativity that explain their own creativity. Personal experiences can be interpreted as small-scale renditions of grand narratives which, in turn, attribute some of the personally celebrated qualities of creative entrepreneurs as characteristics of the ethnos and the nation-state. There is, for example, an abstract elective affinity between Carmi's story of being attacked by a pedophile and Israeli creative exploits in the face of hardships. There is even a state of propinquity between the two, as Carmi is one of the pillars of the geek sector. Israel and Israelis are thus constructed as undisciplined, fresh, energetic, and defiant. Childlike behavior, thought, and even weakness are constructed as prerequisites for miraculous creative activities and paranoia considered a precursor to elitism,itself construed as a reward for having endured the paranoia. In this chapter I stressed in particular the importance of the audacious unruliness embedded in the ability to engage in play as formulated by Bateson in the performative renditions of the "creator-as-child" model in flux events (unconferences). The peak experiences of these events implicitly negotiate and symbolically celebrate Israel's youthful and powerful ability to disobey normalcy by way of strong-headed creative unruliness and to impose itself on geopolitical natural law. Focus mode events,on the other hand,promote a similar message of "defiance of nature" and of transcendence, but in a more explicit, and therefore more politicized and institutionalized, pedagogical fashion (thus incidentally reaffirming the centrality of children to creativity while toning down its intensity) through the anthropogenic essence and agency embedded in technological creative means. Thus, insofar as the two major themes of the frontstage of creativity in the Jewish-Israeli public sphere are connected, in order to defy mature nature (which stands for natural laws in general and geopolitical natural reasonableness in particular) through elitism and strength, there is first a need to connect with primal
122 nature (as the unbridled creativity of the child) and be somewhat subjected to weakness and paranoia. Creative entrepreneurs regard themselves as the vanguard of subjects who can and do both. The ethnographic contents and analysis presented in this chapter are linked to the positiveness of the concept of creativity as depicted in Chapter 2's theoretical roadmap. They highlight the specificities of creativity's positiveness in both the Jewish- Israeli cultural context and the globalized entrepreneurial context.The Jewish-Israeli elitism-paranoia nexus evoked in theme of miraculousness and the "creator-as-child" model reaches directly to the heart (of the present presence) of all three root metaphors that construe creativity as positive and their interconnectivity."Modernism and capitalism"is possibly the most fundamental, as it provides the metacultural context in which Jewish-Israeli superior creative achievements and capacities are celebrated (and which provides the tools that ensure economic and military survival). "Struggle, resistance, and agency"is directly linked to the theme of miraculousness that highlights survival despite Jewish persecution and Israel's geopolitical inferiority and lack of resources by stressing the positiveness of practices of creative intransigence in the face of control or coercionmore generally and by bravely facing unreasonable challenges in particular. Finally, the "creator-as-child" model, which is seen as compatible with the Israeli national character, alludes to the "God-in-man" root metaphor, as being a child bears a meaning of both intense creative moments of vitality and exuberant spontaneity and the access to fresh thought. A specific contribution of the "creator-as-child" model is worthy of note, as it amplifies the other two root metaphors. The child, although not necessarily an innovator, relates to "modernism and capitalism" by being the recipient of enculturation practices. The child, weak by nature and definition, struggles against persecution and discipline and strives for transcendence and freedom from constraints,thus relating to "struggle, resistance, and agency." In Chapter 2, I referred to the linkage between children, creativity, and play as a not-so-oft cited reason for creativity's positiveness,despite a significant history of academic research on children's creativity and the fostering of creativity in children. My ethnographic data complement this somewhat missing aspect and support the thesis that this linkage functions as a powerful promoter of positiveness and should therefore be more seriously considered. To summarize, the positiveness of creativity in the Jewish-Israeli public sphere is suffused with the two themes that imbue it with a "soothing" power.There is no doubt that the capacity to generate marvels and miracles may be awe-inspiring or reassuring in the face of threat. The benefits of the "creator-as-child" model and its correlation with the other root metaphorsthat enhance positiveness cements the place of creativity in the category of the "light" in both of its meanings: public and positive. This is certainly the case for people acquainted with the realm of creative entrepreneurship and is most likely
123 for the wider public as well. However, it became clear during my fieldwork that the public elation and uncritical welcome of creativity and its public meanings, namely that Israel's creative superpower status is real and highly beneficial, were contested when discussed in private. Not all emotions are expressed in the public sphere,and many people hold more complex views of creativity which is not regarded by them as unequivocally positive. Many of these opinions are kept more private in what I call in the next chapterthe backstage, which serves as an ethnographic complement to the current chapter’s presentation ofthe frontstage. For example, referring to the "soothing power" of creativity mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph, the overconfidence hinted at supertextually by the theme of miraculousness and the juvenility that may accompany the "creator-as-child" model are the focus of privately expressed critical views of subjects in the field concerning the frontstage of creativity. Similarly themed views, which are absent from the frontstage and from the superficial encounter or interviews with informants,were nevertheless elicited over time as the fieldwork progressed and are presented in Chapter 4as the backstage. The Derridean différance also continues, as Chapter 4's empirical findings differfrom the currentchapter in terms of the character of their content (criticism rather than admiration) and their structural positioning within the sociocultural order (private rather than public,backstage rather than frontstage). They nonetheless possess a fair share of similarities, originating from the same community of informants and ethnographic sites often at the same time. The transition to the next chapter therefore corresponds with the Derridean line of thought due to my interest in the multifaceted and contradictory nature of the meaning of creativity.This appreciation of creativity coexists with the fears it elicits, and the incomprehension of creativity paradoxically generates hopes of a very rational and well- elucidated nature.
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Chapter 4: The Hidden Absence of Backstage Critique and the Hidden Presence of Omnipotent Guardianship: The Backstage Opinions of Jewish-Israeli Creativity
Introduction
This chapter complements the frontstage emphasis of the previous chapter by providing an ethnographic presentation and analysis of the backstage. The backstage constitutes the "dark side" of creativity's positiveness as portrayed theoretically in Chapter 2 and ethnographically in Chapter 3. It is "dark" in the sense that it echoes the themes explored in these other chapters with references that are acknowledged by some interviewees and may be observed in a subtler formation in the public sphere but are either absent from publicly asserted discourse or only present to a limited extent. These references are more critical, controversial, covert,orpoint toward obscure,secret or infinite arenas. Here, too, there are underlying ideologies, explanations for Israeli success and assumptions dealing with the elicitation and nurturing of creativity. These opinions are, as stated, expressed by agents belonging to the same social categories examined in Chapter 3and yet, in varying degrees, cannot be – or are not meant to be – rendered public. I refer to them as "backstage opinions." The first category of backstage opinions includes direct and indirect critiques of the root metaphors of creativity's positiveness developed in the theoretical roadmap (Chapter 2) and their ethnographic concomitants (Chapter 3). I call it "the hidden absence of critique",thus alluding to Derrida and implying that, unlikethe second category, these opinions are totally absent from the frontstage and the casual observer in the public sphere is,for the most part, protected from them. The second category comprises non- critical backstage opinions that refer to the public configurations of creativity-related issues, particularly the Jewish genius, secrecy, and "creative infinity" – in my terms, "the hidden presence of omnipotent guardianship" (discussed below). By hidden presence, I suggest that while many elements from this category are underplayed in the frontstage,they are not entirely absent and are even rather supportive of the frontstage's claims. The relative controversiality or structural concealment of these opinions prevents them from forcefully entering the public sphere, and their absence, either relative or absolute, reinforces the present presence of the frontstage's positiveness.This chapter strives to answer the following questions in particular: 1) which root metaphors and major Jewish-Israeli themes are being privately criticized and how, andwhich aspectsare emphasized?; 2) what non-critical backstage opinions are expressed regarding Jewish-Israeli creativity and creativity in general?; and 3) assuming that the frontstage and the backstage are related, thematically and otherwise, what constitutes
125 their interrelatedness and the relational nature of the dark and light sides of creativity in Jewish-Israeli national culture? In the following pages, I present ethnographic material from interviews and participant-observation that answers these questions and then proceed with a theoretical analysis of these findings. Two major kinds of backstage opinions emerge from the ethnographic material and its subsequent analysis. Part 1therefore discusses what I refer to as "the hidden presence of the backstage critique,"while Part 2 addresses the non- critical backstage opinions,"the hidden presence of omnipotent guardianship."I conclude the chapter with a discussion of how each theme relates to the findings presented in Chapters 2 and 3.
Part 1: The Hidden Absence of the Backstage Critique
I now turn to the ethnography that relates to the backstage opinions, namely, the non- public critical stances expressed by my informants in formal and informal interviews. These critiques relate to the three root metaphors that promote creativity's positiveness and their ethnographic manifestations as described in earlier chapters and reveal a set of alternative perceptions of creativity distanced from the enthusiastic Jewish-Israeli frontstage.
Backstage Critique of the "Creator-as-Child" Model The "creator-as-child" model stands as the primary ontological and phenomenological framework through which creativity is celebrated as positive in the public sphere.Three critical facets referring to this model were highlighted during fieldwork: lack of parental support, Israel as a childish nation, and the creative fantasy of the child. Lack of parental support. The "creator-as-child" model is a celebration of a free-spirited and youthful defiance against the world of adults, and in this sense it is also closely associated with the root metaphor of "struggle, resistance, and agency."While this view is most characteristic of the unconference format, for purposes of contrast, I begin by highlighting it through a reference to the Burning Man festival. This festival's core values of"radical self-expression,""radical self-reliance," and high-level mashups of art and bricolage are deeply influential for many creators, entrepreneurs, and makers in Israel (many of whom also participate in unconferences). In 2011, during my early encounters with members of the Israeli Burning Man community who regularly attended the annual gathering in the United Statesand who were, at the time,trying to establish an Israeli branch or community (which was then in its early stages of consolidation), I tried to understand the meaning of the eponymous burning man, namely, the wooden effigy
126 burned at the festival's climax. Ron, one of the central members of the Israeli community, explained it to me as following.
There is no universal interpretation for the significance of the burning man, but I'll give you mine. One of the central ideas of the burning man is extreme self- reliance. In my view, the "man" symbolizes everything you don't do yourself. It's the man who takes care of you, feeds you, sells you things, forgives you, or promises you eternal life or whatever. And, when you burn him, you burn everything that's external to you and caters to your needs – you will do it yourself. No one will sell you food at the festival, you will bring it. You want to build something? You'll initiate it and build it, and if you need help, you'll gather the necessary people. You don't need any life philosophy invented by someone else; you'll create your own. To me, when we burn the "man," we get back all the powers we have been delegating to others all this time, whoever they may be:God, the government, various people you've been depending on, and so forth.
Ron's words, expressing the idea of radical self-reliance which is one of the core principles of the Burning Man ideology, correspond with the "creator-as-child" model. Both point to the benefits of the creator's disconnection from any kind of metaphorical parental aid, care, overseeing, regulation, or support. However, in private interviews, several creators and entrepreneurs, while not denying the importance and relevance of the model's central tenets, articulated the complexity of a structurally-imposed rebellious position or of the ambition to be self-sufficient in a risk-taking, entrepreneurial cosmology.They heavily criticized the state for being a metaphorical negligent parent to children who engage in new and creative endeavors. In my interview with Ilan, the toy inventor mentioned in Chapter 3, he defined creativity using both the spirit of the "creator-as-child" model and an academic definition that stresses the reconciliation of opposites, namely,a combination of (adult) cleverness and (childlike) stupidity.
You're like the coyote in the cartoons. You jump off the cliff because you're stupid, you've been chasing the roadrunner, your dream, and it's eluded you. Sometimes you jump even in spite of people's warnings. And then you find yourself standing in mid-air, staring dumbfounded at the camera and about to fall. But, unlike the coyote, you discover precisely at this point that you have wings and that you can fly. The empty void becomes the thermal updraft and the obstacle becomes a challenge. But you wouldn't have discovered them if you hadn't jumped, which you wouldn't have done if you'd been smart in the first place. So the jump is the kid in me and the wings the adult in me. If I had been smart enough to protect myself, I wouldn't be creative.
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After establishing the duality of danger and safety of a creative entrepreneurial economy, Ilan then went on to talk about his own experiences of failure:
My family and I have known some very high highs but also some very low lows. We had our day soaring through the sky, but then a product I heavily depended on failed and the infernal descent began along with the crash, and my wings didn't help this time. We filed for bankruptcy, and now we are slowly climbing our way back up. Suddenly I understood that this game could be painful, and that it is true, what they say:if you have one successful product, you should be ready with another one. And that it is unwise to be dependent on one customer – basic things like that. The danger in the dream of creative self-actualization is that every once in a while the steamroller of society crushes you. The guy who set himself on fire at that protest,87 I can totally understand that. As a self-employed entrepreneur who invented a few things, I can tell you that the system in our dear start-up nation [I met Ilan at a professional exhibition that was promoting Israel as such] knows how to accommodate you only when you succeed. When you don’t succeed, they don’t even bother to say "good luck," they just don't care. When this happens, you can't help but think that they would've been all too happy to take their taxes and have someone write about me or whatever had the project been successful. If we are the pride and joy, the poster boys of this country, don't we deserve some kind of safety net? Right now, any person who want to express himself or herself, to self-actualize, they do so at a very high risk.
In his account, Ilan provided a clear connection between being a child and failing and bemoaned the fact that from a structural standpoint the nation-state is unable to embrace the failure of the entrepreneurial child and instead only appropriates and celebrates instances of "adult" success. Ilan thus upheld and validated the basic tenets of the "creator-as-child" model for an epistemological and ontological account of entrepreneurial creativity (involving both the origin of the idea and its implementation): the child is unafraid of endangering themself and making mistakes, despite well- intentioned advice and normative rules that would ensure safety. Ilan also reiterated the root metaphor of "struggle, agency, and resistance" of creativity's positiveness but refrained from unequivocally affirming its positive heroism. Instead, in the face of financial risk and failure in the neoliberal cosmology, Ilan asked for the comfort of a parental state, criticizing Israelas a negligent parentwho celebrates creative risk-taking successes but denies responsibility for failures. Ilan thereby enriched the interpretation
87On July 14, 2012, one year after the 2011 Israeli social justice protests, a man named Moshe Silman set himself on fire in a similarly themed demonstration. Shortly before doing so, he distributed a letter which read: "The State of Israel has robbed me and left me with nothing. It takes from the poor and gives to the rich and to the public sector. I will not be homeless." (Hovel & Even, 2012)
128 of the "creator-as-child" model with experiences of suffering and failure and not only avictorious narrative of defiance in spite of weakness – the publicly shared reading. In another instance, I met with the director of the Israel Exotic Fruit Association (a banker who does this in his spare time) to inquire about innovation in agriculture.The director referred me back to my own university, to Yossi Mizrachi, a sharp and energetic 71-year-old professor. When I met Yossi, he said:
I live in something of a paradox. Everybody's asking for innovation but nobody wants it. When I say no one, I mean no one. As soon as you offer it, they will sabotage you, undermine you, they'll see to it that it won't work.
To prove it, Yossi went to his computer and printed out one page of a report entitled "New Product Development"88 and underlined the following sentences.
Every production system and every mature organization is fortified with antibodies against deviations from routine. These antibodies89work overtime to kill all interest in new products, and are very likely to succeed. It is an innate property of every established industrial organization, which is why most new products are created and brought to market by young organizations that have no standard products to occupy them. Yossi then went on to give examples and tell me about the difficulties he encountered in the different aspects of his work (such as various kinds of fruits brought to Israel for experimentation) and especially about the successful crossbreeding of the pitaya fruit by his team.
We brought 45 botanical species to Israel, none of which were known in the international market, only locals knew about them. Unfortunately, the Ministry of Agriculture was not willing to pay a penny for this issue. The Chief Scientist told me, "this is pure science" and sent me to the Ministry of Science. The Ministry of Science told me, "this is agriculture; you cannot get money from here." I turned to international foundations and promoted our desert as an in situ laboratory for crops in desert conditions, because every place is completely different from another. Through them I managed to raise, alone, a lot of money – something like 250,000 to 350,000 US dollars every year for decades. The Israelis ignored this completely, to the point that one of the ministers of agriculture, whom I will not name, was here one day, saw the pitaya and said to me: "Professor Mizrachi, who gave you permission to work on such nonsense?" I replied that in the university I have the academic freedom to do whatever I
88This report's full title is An R&D Strategy for Israeli Agriculture and Associated Industries: Report to the Agricultural Research Organization (1989) by Yishai Sefarim. 89One of the "antibodies" mentioned is, for example, "neglect on the part of the directors of the firm."
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desire, and no one can tell me what to do. We were the first in the world who were able to crack the structure of the color of the pitaya and extract it. We named the color hylocerenin, and it is gorgeous. I turned to food companies, because the market lacks red food coloring. I said,"guys, there is this fruit, it's been eaten for thousands of years with a color that is out of this world.Why don’t we use it as a natural food coloring?" No one was willing to listen to me! With tears in my eyes, I turned to the great food manufacturers, asked for help from the ministries, but no one was willing to listen to me. Who did listen to me? The local BeerSheba ice creamcompany! The owner was 92 years old when I turned to her. She said, "Yossi, bring it to me, I am willing to start production," and she was the first in Israel to make ice cream with the pitaya color. She was a pioneer and an exceptional person. Unfortunately, she passed away….I developed another thing recently, a special crop of the marula fruit whose juice has exceptionally healthy features. And I called out to food manufacturers: "Come sell marula juice with the color of the pitaya!" Who else in the world has such a thing? We are the only ones! Don't these people know how fortunate we are to live in such a diverse country? [referring to the soil and climate]To date, they have all rejected me.90
Yossi, not unlike Ilan, displayed a certain duality. On the one hand, he subscribed to the idea that "struggle, agency, and resistance" are part and parcel of the creative endeavor, illustrated in his story of singlehandedly fundraising or defending his project, derided by others as "nonsense." He even hinted at the "creator-as-child" model by distinguishing (in the quoted report) between mature and established companies and younger ones more capable of innovation. On the other hand, through his story, Yossi refrained from conceptualizing this struggle as positive and heroic or even necessary. More than defiance, his call is for collaboration and support, primarily from parental powers, in the sense that the parent is the hierarchically superior. In the spirit of creativity's public perception, especially insofar as the root metaphor of "struggle, agency, and resistance" is concerned, Ilan and Yossi did acknowledge that a certain amount of tension is inherent to the creative process. However, by focusing on pain and failure, they formulated a twofold critique of creativity's positiveness. The first aspect concerns the direct denunciation of the State of Israel's parental neglect of creative people even while publicly welcoming them and their endeavors. The second aspect is an abstraction of the first and consists of a rejection of distress as natural, necessary or heroic, in contrast to the set of messages concerning the concept of creativity promoted in the public sphere (and epitomized in the significance of the Burning Man for Ron). These informants do not celebrate pain and
90I saw Yossi again a year after the interview at an agricultural exhibition. He had his own personal stand in the space devoted to exotic fruits. The pitaya-colored marula juice remains an unrealized dream.
130 failure as a necessary and glorified stage in a trajectory that inevitably ends in creativity's victory even after numerous failed attempts. In other words, they do not subscribe to the idea of a naturally pathologized interaction between creative agency and circumstantial parental forces. Their accounts correspond more with the deconstruction of the myth of the lone genius, referring to the schema of the creative individual versus a persecuting society portrayed in Chapter 2. An alternative model is implied in which collaboration, cooperation, and reconciliation replace confrontation. The prevalent interpretation of creativity as a positive celebration of a struggle between opposed forces sidelines and neutralizes such alternative discourse, which is suppressed and construed as an unrequited part of the concept. Creativity's positiveness construes pathologized interactions as heroic and collaboration as uncreative and perhaps even cowardly. This narrow interpretation may, according to some informants, be harmful.
Israel as a childish nation. Throughout my fieldwork and particularly in entrepreneurial circles, entrepreneurs often privately expressed their frustrations with a set of undesirable qualities of the Israeli entrepreneurial ethos. They referred specifically to the culture of informality and the questioning of authority,broadly acknowledged as a prime characteristic of the start-up nation and, to a large extent, publicly celebrated (see Chapter 3). While some informants interpreted these qualities as the inevitable albeit regrettable side-effects of the generallybeneficial Israeli chutzpah, for others it raised deeper concerns about the Israeli ability to create sustainable industries, as they interpreted these features as evidence of a dangerous lack of responsible long-term planning. When I asked Rafi, an entrepreneur and member of the geek community, whether Israel could be considered creative, he answered "yes and no," suggesting an overlap of positive and negative:
Obviously, "yes," because we have creativity [alluding to an entrepreneurial spirit]and it's good because it's good. On the other hand, it isn't good,because everyone is obsessed with start-ups. We don't deal with things that are scalable, we don’t create big industries. A few guys get together and divide the labor between them: "you'll be in charge of the technology, you'll be in charge of finances, and so on"…everybody pretty much improvises their job as they go along, because everybody is rushing for the coveted "exit – the acquisition." We are a childish nation. We refuse to rely on past knowledge and proven pathways that have been established or discovered. If you think about it, how do masters or teachers operate? They lead the student on their way, let them struggle on their own and suffer a little bit, and then send them off to continue the job they have started. We're not like that, because everybody chooses to create their own path. We know! We don't need anybody's advice, we know everything: what to do, and how to do it better than you – we even know how to do your job better than
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you! My military service was a trauma for me. I was in an electronics unit, a unit whose ethos was seemingly creativity but I was anti-creative because I wanted to get the job done right! Everybody else was creative in the sense that things that needed to be done weren't done. Equipment sent for repair came back broken, and you could get away with not doing things by pretending that you had. That was hafifnikiut [a slang term for work done in a superficial and slipshod fashion]. This creativity is dangerous, and when you think in terms of start-ups, you can't help but think about how most start-ups ultimately fail. Do you want to have an industry based on failures? When we fail, I don't even know if it's an Israeli failure, we could be drinking dry the pensions of old Americans.
Near the end of our conversation, as I thanked him for his time, Rafi, fully aware of the discrepancy between his words and the public perception of Israeli creative entrepreneurship, apologized for not having delivered the bright and sunny interpretation he thought I was looking for. His response is replete with references to the "creator-as-child" model as negative renditions of the qualities of children that it publicly celebrates. However, in Rafi's interpretation, defiance, effrontery, and fearless improvisation are reformulated as a childish propensity for unprofessionalism, rooted in a disdain for learning and the refusal of advice based on experience and maturity and even, to some degree,rectitude. It is as though, by being so "childish," Israelis squander financial resources provided by the American "parent" culture. Most of the other informants who skirted around similar themes offered a somewhat softer criticism, for example, an entrepreneur called Yaron:
Israelis do take the money and run. That's what they do. Ask any Israeli what he wants – he wants the "exit," to sell the company and get the money. There are very few exceptions to this, and I think it has something to do with who we are as a nation;we are impatient and that's why entrepreneurship is so big here. People from Europe or the United State can work as salaried employees all their lives and be happy. But Israelis are not like that, they are much more present- oriented. The concept of working hard now so I can have what I want or do what I like later has no value here. This is more suited to Europe or America. Israelis want to be happy now. Maybe it has something to do with our unclear future here, I don't know. Still, don't get me wrong, I don't think it's bad – people get their money, the government gets its taxes, and most of the money from my experience is reinvested here in upcoming startups. And yet, it is not enough. The idea that you want something, you get it, and then you turn your back on it all, on a large scale, that's not responsible planning. For an individual it's fine. For a country, it's not healthy.
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Yaron's critique is less harsh. He alluded to a national cultural trait of present- orientedness to account for impatience that refuses to await a metaphorical adulthood for an improved quality of life. Both Rafi and Yaron, albeit to a lesser extent, associated the Israeli ("child") with features connoting an absence of long-term planning, impatience, arrogance, over-confidence, maladroitness, and shoddy work practices. Through these, they express concern for Israel's economic future should Israel fail to develop a scalable, solid, and continuous technological industry in lieu of the series of punctuated instances of creative entrepreneurial successes. Both informants offered a negative critique that mirrors the positive celebration of the interconnectivity of the root metaphors of "modernism and capitalism" and "struggle, agency, and resistance." Precisely where the creative and autonomous unruliness, frenetic activity, and agency of the "creator-as-child" entrepreneur is celebrated in the most positive frontstage, there isa critical backstage. In this sense, the adherence to a strictly entrepreneurial ethos, such as the one celebrated in the public sphere according to which creativity may directly and indirectly be associated with "unlearning" and fearless activity, may lead away from a responsible economic mindset on both personal and national levels.
The creative fantasy of the child.The categories of "child" and "adult" are, especially in unconferences and other instances of play, purposefully confounded since the "creator-as-child" model glorifies the child's capacity to access higher degrees of freedom of thought and action. Those high degrees of freedom encourage more far- fetched or frivolous ideas and behavior. Such ideas are the hallmarks of creativity in many of its celebrations, not only in unconferences but in various techniques of creativity-enhancement too, such as those which encourage reducing to a minimum self- criticism of frivolous ideas91 (and thus also correspond with "struggle, agency, and resistance" against external or self-imposed censorship). When I talked about the unconference format with Tal, another member of the Geek community who regularly attends unconferences, he said:
To tell you the truth, I still go to these things, but strictly for networking purposes. I have a lot of criticism about the more hedonistic aspects of the format. Think about it: they gather the smartest people in the country, perhaps in the world, with super-advanced knowledge in the latest cutting-edge technology trends. Some of them are true geniuses. These are people who could literally come up with solutions to world famine, for example. All of them come to a hotel or convention center for a few days. And what are they given to do? They build useless toys, watch dancing robots, drink beer, and have a big dress-
91This group of techniques is sometimes referred to as "barrier models" and featured extensively in the workshops Ziv and I ran; for example, in the spirit of "smart and useless ideas," participants would be asked to think of a ludicrous feature for a product and then required to justify its existence rationally.
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up party in the evening. I am not saying they should be asked to work for free, but I don't see how anyone in their right mind could not consider this a waste of time and talent.
Tal undermined one of the most fundamental principles of unconferences: the premise that silliness is the mother of invention. He reframed the "smart and useless" idiom and the carnivalesque in terms of childish or teenage activities and counterposed these with actual contributions to serious problems that can be solved through knowledge, experience, and elitist capacities –all characteristics of the "adult" category. For him, practicing frivolity is not exercising creativity. Far-fetched ideas were also the target of criticism and ambivalence when presented in contexts in which they were not only deemed inappropriate but also dangerous. One such moment of ambivalence occurred during a heated debate at the seniors' presentations phase of the summer camp competition,where I was serving as a judge in July 2012. During the presentations, three participants got up on the stage for their demonstration and began by explaining that Israel's security threat from enemy missiles would be answered by James Clerk Maxwell, one of the main discoverers of electromagnetism, whose picture was shown in their presentation. Their idea consisted of creating a gigantic magnetic field in the Negev desert armed with anti-missile response, whose magnetic power would draw any missile launched at Israel to its field where it would subsequently be destroyed. After the presentations, when we (the judges) stepped out to deliberate the various presentations in private, an argument developed between Dotan and Roy, two counselors. While Dotan thought it was a good idea,Roy was furious at the far-fetched and, in his words, "stupid" idea. Dotan tried to appease him, saying that while he agreed the idea was far from feasible, the boys still deserved some praise (and points) for imagination and for out-of-the-box thinking. Roy replied:
I have an out-the-box thought for you, I'm going to put a giant black hole just next to Israel, so that every missile launched at us will disappear into it and come out at the far end of the universe, how's that? That's not innovation, right? Where do you draw the line?
The exchange of accusations and justifications went on for a little while longer, and eventually,with all factors combined, the judges, myself included, put the group in third (and last) place. After the discussion, I took Roy aside and asked him to elaborate on his feelings.
What's most troubling to me is that those guys are from abroad, but they are 18– 19 years old. If they had been here, they would've been in the army. Imagine them in special units. Okay, they would've been formed and trained, but still, that kind
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of thinking! I'm terrified at the idea of putting the security of my loved ones in such hands. There comes a time when you have to just grow up and think in terms of responsibility or feasibility especially in Israel, especially in the field of defense. We rely on creativity, right? You research creativity, don't you? Is creativity synonymous with cleverness or with idiocy? They are not allowed to offer such ridiculous propositions, that's something the megabytes [the campers aged 13–14] would do.
In Roy's opinion, in this case, the tendency of the child to creative unrealistic fantasy converges with the envisioning of utopian ideas characteristic of future-oriented conceptions of progress. Such conceptions of progress relate in turn to "modernism and capitalism" in the sense that both refer to an oft-celebrated ability to consider the seemingly impractical. However, in the context of Israel's real security threats and adult- like requirements for feasibility, the results presented for Roy a very real threat, especially when coming from young adults who are still operating according to modes of thought that can no longer be accepted, let alone celebrated, at their age. Roy therefore warned against an absolute association of creativity with its highly valued penchant for frivolity in which "anything goes." He advocated a tempered and reasoned approach to creativity and a clear separation between exercises in creativity,which may be associated with children (as yet-to-be-adults), and creativity-as-products (innovation), which is associated with the adult's ability to provide practical innovation that, in this particular case, relates to the safety of the nation. In short, the publicly celebrated "creator-as-child" model provides the phenomenological and ontological framework for privately making sense of negative experiences relating to entrepreneurship and creative endeavors. All informants cited above used the "creator-as-child" model to articulate stances critical of the public perceptions of creativity. Through this model they challenged the root metaphors of "struggle, agency, and resistance" and "modernism and capitalism"andacknowledged a preference for protection and collaboration over belligerence and competition. They pointed out the some of the juvenile qualities of the Israeli entrepreneurial ethos, expressed doubts concerning its ability to uphold the ongoing state-building and long- term sustainment of Israel, andreferred to the dangers of creative fantasy.They thus can be seen to privately emphasizethe risks of a model publicly celebrated as positive.
Backstage Critique of the Concepts of Human Exceptionality and Israeli Miraculousness
As mentioned in Chapter 2, creativity, in the classical and uncritical reading of all three root metaphors that promotes its positiveness, is essentially a celebration of human exceptionality. The references to rational and intuitive geniuses, visionary
135 entrepreneurs, and resisting subjects affirm the existence of a small set of people capable of channeling more creativity than others. This reading largely acknowledges the individual's mind, body, and agency as the sole source of a manifestation of creativity. In the Jewish-Israeli public sphere, the key concept of miraculousness – together with the events through which it is celebrated – are construed in a similar fashion.Creative events, by their very definition, transcend mundanity and highlight various degrees of material success as though revealing supernatural (albeit human) creative power. In the specific Jewish-Israeli context, such inclinations correspond with the notion of the exceptionality of Israel and of the ethno-national collective, which is located across and above other collectives incapable of similar achievements. The ensuing ethnography showcases instances in which these assumptions regarding creativity (such as innovation and entrepreneurship) and Israeli exploits are challenged privately by the same social milieu that celebrates them publicly. The critics present a more complex and less enthusiastic celebration of extraordinary human capacity and, indirectly, of Israel as extraordinary. In a youth competition I attended in May 2013, I sat with the judges during the final stages of the competition between three teams (all in their final year of highschool), each representing their school and accompanied by a mentor, usually a teacher with a technological background. The first team presented an idea consisting of a system to prevent helicopters fromstrikingpower cables during low flight. (They claimed that the idea originated in a suggestion made by an older friendwho had just completed his training as a helicopter pilot.) The second team presented a system of devices aimed at patients suffering from ALS, which enabled the immobile subjects to control various devices around the house (e.g., switching television channels and turning on lights). The third team, and the winners of the competition, were three Druze students from a village in the northern part of the country who presented an idea inspired by the tragic death of their friend (who was killed when his car broke down on a railway track, not leaving enough time for him to escape the car or for the train driver to stop).The students proposed equipping all railroad crossings with a moving platform that could identify the presence of a stuck car by its weight, alert any upcoming train in enough time, and move the car automatically to the other side of the road. They presented a scale model of their invention using a toy train and a toy car and proceeded to demonstrate their idea: the toy train moved along the circuit, one of the students brought the toy car onto the platform (on the railroad crossing), which immediately sent a cellular signal to the train that began to slow down, while the platform quickly slid the car away off the rails and back onto the road. The team was commended by the judges for their social conscientiousness, the feasibility of their idea, and the elaborate and meticulous presentation. Their winning was announced in an "official" classroom,that is, one decorated with the Israeli national flag, a picture of Herzl, and a copy of the Declaration of Independence. These
136 symbols presumably attested to the relevance of the non-Jewish winners in this competition. When the judges were left behind closed doors to discuss and evaluate the three presentations, Wated, the technical mentor of the train team, unsure of who I was exactly, approached me. (He later said that he had been anxious to know the results, and since he had seen me sitting next to the judges, he thought I might know something.)I complimented him and his students on their outstanding work and asked him whether he thought it would be harder to pull off such a project in their disadvantaged and less- privileged non-Jewish sector than in the more affluent Jewish sector. Wated's response was interesting:
It's actually easier. The Arab teams frequently win these kinds of competitions. Last year it was a Bedouin team from the South and also the year before that….The reason is that there are better mentors in the Arab schools. You see, a Jew with an engineering diploma will not go and be a teacher somewhere, he'd rather find work in engineering, and he's got a better chance of doing so. An Arab engineer has slimmer chances of finding work in engineering in the Arab sector and even less in the Jewish sector. So he'll go and find work in education, be a teacher, and earn a 5000-shekel salary, much lower than an actual engineer. The Jewish mentors are teachers, the Arab mentors are engineers. That's why we win and that's not a good thing, but it's better than nothing.
Wated challenged the prevalent narrative in which innovation and creativity are attributed solely to individual or collective talent. Instead, he reframed his team's capacities within the structural exclusion of Arab-Israeli engineers from attractive positions in the Israeli labor market, which relegates them to the educational system where they ultimately make their creative mark in youth competitions.92The latter two domains are, as he explained, less lucrative, both financially and instrumentally. Wated refuted the claim that a successful creative processcan be attributed to talent alone in isolation from other social factors. His last sentence, in particular, in which he claimed that winning might not be a good thing, shows his belief that discriminatory or exploitative systems among certain populations may be masked or normalized by the celebration of creativity,the kind that provides operational problem-solving through excellent active agents, and thus relates to the root metaphor of "modernism and capitalism." In another instance, at a Garage Geek meeting, which, like every other, focused on the success story of a visiting entrepreneur, I was standing with Oren, from Max's
92It might be tempting to compare this predicament to narratives of Jewish persecution in the sense that both are characterized by similar causal dynamics of creativity and hardship. However, such a "repressive-hypothesis" comparison obfuscates the fact that in such cases, an oppressive system does not lead to more creativity but, at best, merely to differently manifested celebrations of creativity. Such a comparison would, in addition, be distractingly politically loaded.
137 group. We were next to the workshop wall on which inscriptions and signatures had been scribbled by previous visitors, such as Google co-founder, Sergei Brin, who had written "Keep on Googling," and other internationally renowned industry people. Wineglasses in hand, we listened to the entrepreneur being interviewed about his start-up. Toward the end of the interview, Oren turned to me and said: "You realize this is all bullshit, don't you?" I looked at him awaiting an elaboration, which he was more than happy to provide.
This game is ultimately about luck. These ones, the guys who made it, are the lucky ones. We're celebrating the guys that were lucky, and they are presented as having had the right idea or the proper business model. Come on! Ideas? All ideas are good. Business models? All of them are viable. This stuff, this start-up game, is just a shot in the dark. Everybody tries, some get lucky, some don't, but then, when we meet and discuss innovation or start-ups or creativity or whatever, what we are doing is talking about the lucky ones as having had the right idea and the correct business model. To me, it is much more interesting to hear about the failures, they have the same calorie content in terms of ideas. They were just unlucky. You're not supposed to learn about luck in the guise of success. This will confuse you and misguide you in your own projects. That's just a mistake. Imagine the size of the event you could hold with failure stories. People would come out of here with 10 times more insight and ideas, good ideas! Why stick to one success story?
Like Wated, Oren refused to decontextualize creative success stories and endow them with an aura of exceptionalism. Instead of locating success in the talent of an individual elevated above the norm, Oren located success inthe intersection between attempt and circumstance, more in the vein of the concept of serendipity. By asserting that success and failure are, on the whole,equals, Oren formulated a critique of extraordinariness and exceptionalism in an event that celebrates creativity in precisely the latter terms. This idea of the basic equality of all agents in a given network was powerfully reiterated in an interview with Kobi, another successful entrepreneur and member of the geek community. Kobi had been in the army for eight years. When I asked him what the secret was behind Israel's creativity, he replied without hesitation:
The only secret is our military service, there's nothing else. There is no Jewish mind, there's an Israeli one, and it comes from the army. That's why there are things in Israel that do not exist in places like India or other such places with more engineers. What the army does is that it hires you forhigh-profile jobs at the age of 18 with no credentials. You are given huge responsibilities, or
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missions, or made to play with money, or develop something, or be responsible for people's lives. Army service contributes to the sense that you are capable of tackling considerable challenges, and that fact that it you do at a young age is good. This is a kind of governmental subsidy or investment in human capital for the future benefit of Israeli industry. Every moment of my mandatory service was torture, but if you can tolerate three years of suffering, then you can take on other things. The army breaks you and reconstructs you as an obedient soldier.
I asked Kobi how one breaks and reconstructs a person. He went on:
It's when he doesn't have control over his schedule. He doesn't know what he's going to do in a few minutes or tomorrow. He's not in charge. I, his commander, take his freedom away and give him assignments from which there is no escape. Then, at some point, you, the soldier, let go of the thought that maybe the magnitude of the task is beyond you, that you can't or don't want to do it. This is your mission, and you will carry it out, period. There is nowhere to run. If, in the United States, you have the possibilityof opting out if college is too hard, you can't opt out of anything in the army. Even if you defect, you will be brought back to the same place you left. If you can tolerate three years of that, then you can go through your own little personal hell until something comes out of your start-up. Had I not been in the army, I would have been a salaried employee and not an entrepreneur. During these formative years, it became clear very quickly that I would turn into a very specific kind of adult – an adult who doesn't stop trying. In unconferences, you're applauded when you fail, precisely because that's the message: keep trying and eventually something will stick, eventually you won't fail. And even if you fail all your life, you will still have lived your life among new ideas and new technologies, doing what you like.
Kobi was referring to the prominent role of military training in the rise of the Israeli high-tech industry, discussed in Chapter 1. In the Jewish-Israeli elitism-paranoia nexus that pervades the public sphere, the military plays the part of the successful collective response to the overarching problem of paranoia and weakness and is thus one of the constituents of the theme of miraculousness. More privately, however, Kobi presented a somewhat less enthusiastic and upbeat attitude toward entrepreneurial creative achievements, seeing them as nothing more than the predictable results of a certain type of training. He did not fully acknowledge or celebrate an inherent creative capacity that would characterize some but not others given similar circumstances. Theoretically speaking, this position stands at odds with the awe at the wonders emanating from the depths of singular genius minds depicted in Chapter 2's roadmap. Insofar as the public sphere is concerned, Kobi's critique still celebrates Israel's "start-
139 up nation" status but ascribes it to a rationale that is not subsumed by miraculousness but is instead related to the mandatory military service, which through structural selection (and however unpleasant the experience) clearly advantages Jewish men over women or people of other ethnicities, in other words, Palestinian-Israelis. I close the presentation of the relevant ethnographic material with the sole occasion when Israel was blatantly asserted to be unexceptional. I met Eyal, also an entrepreneur, at an innovation exhibition where he came to visit one of his friends. We sat down for a short but intense talk about Israeli creativity. This was the first and only time I had heard anyone from the field attacking the principal themes and rhetorical strategies relating to the theme of miraculousness presented in Chapter 3. Eyal responded furiously when I described the narratives and opinions of my previous informants and insisted on a more skeptical and realistic approach to Israel's exploits:
What I hate about this stuff is the mythology, like we are some kind of superpower. I assure you, my dear friend, we are not. For example, you can go out and get reliable statics and data about patents, and you will see how many patents actually come from Israel. I don't trust the Ministry of Commerce and Industry on statistics. What are numbers? Basically anything you want them to be. This data is distorted for all kinds of reasons. People who issue patents in Israel, for example, are also required to issue patents elsewhere in the world, so they stand out. But those registering in the United States don't have to register in Israel, so it appears as less. It depends on the size of your market, and if an entrepreneur wants to impress me, he should bring me statistics from the US Patent Office – those I trust. Their numbers sound more real. What else are we proud of?…Oh, the agriculture! We really stole everything there. The dates came from Jordan, the olives from Syria, and the brand Jaffa for the oranges came from the Templers. And everything is presented as Israeli. The Nobel Prize winners is another travesty: Israel is not necessarily connected to Jewish Nobel prize winners. I'm sorry, but Jewish-Americans are not Israeli-Jews in any way nor are Israelis who immigrated to the United States. They're Americans, that's where they live and work, and that's where the support for their research came from. We need to be humble –look at the literature on inventions and if you do that, you will see how much hasn't been invented by Jews. We have a lot of gays, that's good.93We live in a small place, that's good too.94 A lot of immigrants who came here and had to make it –that was the foundation. The army also teaches
93Eyal is referring to the well-known correlation between the presence of gays and creative people in the same geographical area (the most notable example being the San Francisco Bay Area)that I referred to in Chapter 2. Florida (2002) attributed this phenomenon to the inclination of both groups to live in politically tolerant climates. Interestingly, there have been psychometric attempts to discover whether gays are inherently more creative than straights, but no evidence has been found (see Noor, Chee, & Ahmad, 2013). 94 Eyal was referring to the assertion that smaller networks generate more creativity and cross-fertilizing encounters alongside easier networking (see Chapter 2).
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innovation. Now, will this go on forever? I don't know, nobody does. And if it doesn't scare the shit out of you that some people believe that because of this mythology then we're safe and sound for the next 100 years, then it should!
In his harsh words, Eyal identified the theme of miraculousness as a self- deceptive distortion of reality and equated it with an objective truth. His radical and confident critique directly addressedthe rhetorical strategies used in the emplotment of Israel's miraculousnessdiscussed in Chapter 3. In particular, his mistrust of easily manipulated numbers and his insistence on historical clarity regarding narratives of creative acts appropriated by Israel refer to the use of dubious statistical data and the implied causality between unrelated facts as tools of persuasion. Eyal, like Kobi, recognized Israel as an unusual concentration of creativity but attributed this to an alternative set of causes, as he interpreted Israeli creativity as a circumstantial confluence of universal facilitators of creativity rather than the result of individual or collective genius. Unlike Kobi, Eyal referred to the potential ephemerality of this state and, by doing so, alluded to the danger of believing in an ever-lasting, essential Jewish- Israeli capacity. All the informants quoted above expressed varying degrees of discontent with the assumption that the occurrence of creative achievements entails the presence of an exceptional personal or ethno-national creative capacity to which those achievements should be credited. Wated, Oren, and Kobi, adding the social factors of social discrimination (which is undermined and resisted yet masked and mystified by creativity), luck, and formal training, criticized thede-contextualization of creative acts and products. This set of opinions tones down the exaltation and celebration of human pinnacles of creativity pushed by the promoters of creativity's positiveness. After the earlier perspectives onthe theme of Israeli miraculousness as a grand-scale rendition of human exceptionalism, Kobi and Eyal provide a sober downplaying:they do not recognize Israeli miraculousnessas a spectacular orcultural singular achievement in terms of its causes or, at least for Eyal, even as palpably real.
Discussion I have presented my ethnographic findings on the private critique of creativity as celebrated in the Jewish-Israeli public sphere by addressing the questions asked at the beginning of this chapter. Given the political nature of the elitism-paranoia nexus which is, in part, contested here, I chose to analyze the relations between the articulations of creativity in the frontstage celebrations and the backstage critique through the suitable terms of hegemony (the former) and subversiveness (the latter). Through these affinities
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– which are, obviously, not absolute – I highlight the power of creativity's positiveness to override critiques and protect the master narratives depicted in Chapter 3. Regarding hegemony, I rely on Comaroff and Comaroff's (1991) observation that since narratives are social practices that are constitutive of and not merely situated within social contexts, they are as likely to bear the imprint of dominant cultural meanings and relations of power as any other social practice. I consider the theme of miraculousness and the "creator-as-child" model to be hegemonic for two reasons.The first is because these cultural productions bear the mark of the Jewish-Israeli elitism- paranoia nexus as some form of consensual political and ideological infrastructure of present-day Israeli nationalism (see Chapter 1). The second reason is because they enact root metaphors that inform the general perception of creativity as forcefully positive. These are, by virtue of their pervasiveness in the popular and academic literature, part of a hegemonic discourse and thus form part of the order of signs, relations, practices, distinctions, and epistemologies drawn from a historically situated cultural field that comes to be taken for granted (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1991). Conversely, the informants mentioned in this chapter inclined toward another kind of narrative, namely,subversive stories (Ewick & Silbey, 1995). In these, informants recount particular experiences that do not necessarily entail the general presentation of specific events as instances among similar caseswhich operatewithin a larger reality. They tend to present themselves not as anomalies but as a broad set of narratives which are different from those shaping the present cosmology and aspire to replace it. It has been argued that the social marginality of a narrator may promote subversive narratives, as the lives and experiences of the marginal are less likely to find expression in the culturally available plots and characters (Comaroff&Comaroff, 1991; Gramsci, 1971). In this respect, the informants cited above are clearly marginal, as their narratives are not those celebrated in the frontstage. However, they are only partially marginal, which is central for the following analysis. In terms of form, this partial marginality is ethnographically evident in that the critique is formulated inside, albeit at the edges, of the limits of the public sphere. This critique is often articulated at events that celebrate creativity and by the same subjects who operate, compete, and are rewarded in the public sphere and who belong to its social milieu (entrepreneurs, creators, competitors,etc.). However, critique is enunciated privately or during downtime and is always distanced from the peaks of the celebrations that characterize the frontstage. It is in this sense that the backstage critique is not completely suppressed but rather pushed to the margins of public discourse. This partial marginality is also reflected in the content of the critique, as the informants express a certain duality with regard to the frontstage. On the one hand, as subversive stories, they manifest an arguably reluctant stance toward hegemonic ideasby pointing out dangerous mindsets and judging creativity and entrepreneurship for their impact on the economic security of
142 both society and state. On the other hand, this reluctance involves a partial acceptance of the criticized themes, whichnevertheless diminishes in proportion to the degree of the sensed danger and its perceived urgency. For example, in the case of the "creator-as- child" model, especially the sub-theme referred to as "lack of parental support," the critique encompasses a basic recognition and even normalization of the tension between creator, society, and creative fantasy yet also includes the alternatives suggested by the informants. More complex standpoints like these reason that the current state of affairs (tension) and the principles which are set to replace it (cooperation) could entertain a dialectical relationship in which the thesis (hegemony) and its antithesis (subversiveness) would engender a synthesis in which the former would be improved by incorporation of the latter. This dialectic is likewise relevant in the cases of Wated's and Oren's implicit calls to contextualize human exceptionality and align non-winners beside winners as equal bearers of intrinsic creativity. In the case of the sub-themes "Israel as a childish nation" and "the creative fantasy of the child" andthe opinions expressed by Kobi and Eyal, the hegemony is judged rather more severely. The informants accept the basic factual premise that Israel is a concentration of creative entrepreneurship but deny the ensuing sequence of sociological deduction that normally leads to the construal of such achievements as miraculous and doubt the capacity of silliness to actually engender miracles. This is denounced as too simplistic, idealized, or incorrect and is correlated with a precarious and perilous course for Israel. As the perceived danger increases, the set of alternatives proposed in the backstage is presented less as potentially merging with hegemonic ideas and more as fully subversive of hegemonic assumptions. It is regarded as their potential replacement in order to ensure the survival of the nation-state, still by creative means. In all of the cases of backstage critique, the commitment of informants to expressing revised modes of thought and action about creativity is underwritten by the epistemological conviction that the subversive story is meant, in some form, to enter the mainstream. Their commitments and convictionsalongside their struggle create a lens through which the operations of the dark side of creativity may be observed, first as a generator of negative creativity and then as a protector of a pathological yet positive creativity. Although references to malevolent creativity (i.e., creativity deliberately intended to damage others) are totally absent, the subversive backstage critique and the dark side of creativity are related in several ways. Negative creativity was defined in Chapter 2 as unintended harm (such as creatively avoiding work and thus creating more work for someone else) or unintended consequences of otherwise positive efforts (such as the understanding of the germ mechanism of a disease that may lead to germ warfare). In the straightforward sense of the term, some of the backstage critique corresponds to the definition of negative creativity as a negative byproduct of otherwise positive
143 creativity. The critique directed at the "creator-as-child" model addresses the negative ramifications of a widely celebrated mode of thought for creativity elicitation and enhancement in the hegemonic frontstage. The critiques of human exceptionality and miraculousness could also be considered a denouncement of negative creativity, as these themes originate in products and processes celebrated in the public sphere, though the correspondence of the ethnographic findings to the definition of negative creativity is inadequate. As mentioned in the analysis of Chapter 2, negative creativity, for example,the link between Pasteur's discovery and biological weaponry, implies a certain disconnection between the positive and negative aspects of creativity, whether socially, temporally, spatiallyin opposing moral value or goals. In other words, negative creativity occurs when a creative capacity or product is disconnected from its original positive intention and redirected by a different subject in a different time and place toward a negative end. The abovementioned ethnography complicates this schema, and the Derridean concept of différance once again enters the debate. Both the themes celebrated in the frontstage and those criticized in the backstage originate in the interconnectivity between material products and processes within a capitalist cosmology and the root metaphors that promote creativity's positiveness. A closer relationship between backstage and frontstage, hegemony and subversion, is thus formed. Taken together, the frontstage and the backstage critiques contend with the underlying structure presented in Chapter 2's theoretical roadmap that acknowledges the production ofthe precedence of positive creativity over its negativity. However, despite the preference of one morality over the other, theinformants deny the existence of one meaning.Instead, they offer a more complex look at shifting moralities, as they both celebrate and criticize different facets of the same creativity-related issues, often at the same time and at the same events, while agreeing on the ultimate goals of self-actualization and financial success for the individual and general safety for the nationand society. Thus, the backstage also validates the frontstage, directly if partially. This state of affairs invites a rethinking and reformulation of the concept of negative creativity in which positive and negative creativity are simultaneous and more closely related. It also invites a look not solely at creative products and processes as unintended perpetrators of negative creativity but at creativity itself. I refer specifically to creativity's self-celebrating quality – powered by its own root metaphors of positiveness – which enhances the admiration of creativity- related cultural items but also operates, in and of itself, as a generator of negative creativity. This interwoven qualityof the frontstage/hegemony and the backstage/subversiveness – or what I described as the partial marginality of the informants who formulate the backstage critique – typifies another form of negative creativity, namely,the ability of creativity's positiveness to successfully defend the
144 hegemonic assumptions that pervade the public discourse. This theoreticallyfollows Ewick and Silbey's (1995) assertion that subversive stories attempt to appropriate the mainstream. The efforts with which alternative mindsets and narratives, inspired by the critique of negative creativity, struggle to make themselves heard in the public sphere are thwarted. Despite their simultaneous coexistence, the inequality between hegemony and subversiveness is not upturned; subversive stories remain marginal and hierarchically inferior, their transformative potential to challenge the hegemonically- constituted world unfulfilled. Although the hegemony produces its own subversion, the attempt of the backstage critiquewith its condemnation of negative creativity to appropriate the mainstream discourse fails because it is at odds with creativity's positiveness that powers the public sphere. Critiques of the "creator-as-child" model are inherently incompatible with the "God-in-man" root metaphor that fuels its public celebration. Similarly, the critique of human and national exceptionality is incompatible with all three root metaphors which relate to it as demonstrated in Chapter 3. The critiques attempting to formulate various warnings about the pathological facets of creativity in the themes of childlikeness and miraculousness are publically flattened and silenced. In the light of creativity's celebration, the hazards decried by the informants are undermined and relegated to the periphery of public discourse. This is especially evident in the cases of Wated and the Druze students,in which the creative celebration casually stifled its marked ethno-national moral failure and underlying social injustice, and in Eyal's appeal for reason and realism, which isobscured by the splendor of Israeli miraculousness. In Derrideanterms, while some informants express the need for a refragmentation of the opposites upon which discourse is formed and even argue in favor of contradiction and unstable meaning (that is, welcoming creativity while occasionally acknowledging its dangers), it is nevertheless the fragmentation that remains discursively victorious. The subversion remains absent and silenced . The findings thus show that positive creativity generates another form of negative creativity that may be integrated into the definition of the term but is distinct from the misuse of instrumental or ideological creativity, namely,the ability of creativity's positiveness to serveas a meta-narrative (and not a narrative) that suppresses alternatives and prevents critique against creativity-related endeavors. By pointing out the inclination of the frontstage toward hegemonic concepts and the inclination of the backstage toward subversiveness, I emphasize a more fluid and dynamic interplay between positive and negative creativity. The data in this chapter combined with the data in Chapter 3 represent the conversational and synchronic natures of positive and negative creativity in several ways. First, the coexistence of hegemony and subversiveness in the same ethnographic time and space brings more dynamism to theoretical formulations that tend to imply a definite disconnection. Second, the ability of the culturally resplendent positiveness of creativity to contribute significantly to the
145 formation of negative creativity shows that creativity itself (as opposed to products) is not a culturally inert item insofar as negative creativity is concerned. Third, the power of creativity's positiveness to silence critique and stabilize the discursive configuration of hegemony and subversiveness shows yet again the centrality of creativity's positiveness in the dark side of creativity. I therefore propose the following reformulation: negative creativity refers to unintended simultaneous negative consequences of otherwise positive creative efforts or to negative effects related to the admiration of creativity. This definition attempts to reconcile the positive and the negative and, by acknowledging the fragmented nature of creativity's positive morality, to incorporate the positive into the negative. In so doing, it contributes to an enhanced comprehension of negative creativity that goes beyond benevolence, malevolence or neutrality and offers an arguably non-static and multifaceted perception of the concept. Not all absence of light, however, is necessarily a critique. I continue the discussion on the fluid and dynamic interplay of the dark and the light in the second part of this chapter. This time, however, the term "dark" refers to a state of being obscure, opaque, secret, infinite, or hidden.
Part 2: The Hidden Presence of Omnipotent Guardianship
Introduction I turn now to the backstage opinions that refer to the themes outlined in Chapter 3 but are not necessarily critical of them. Being backstage opinions, they are not forcefully present in the frontstage or are only present to a certain extent. These backstage opinions are divided into two thematic categories: Jewish genius, and secrecy/infinity. Jewish genius involves the insinuation of a possible essentialized or quasi-racialized account of Jewish creative achievements and is evoked in two main ways:first, as a result of the social configuration in cases in which creative achievements are displayed alongside symbols of Jewishness;and second,as instances in which the theme of miraculousness celebrated in the public sphere enlists the concept of the Jewish genius as an explanation for impressive creative achievements. This aspect belongs to the backstage category in the sense that it is an opinion privately held by some informants but not asserted forcefully in the public sphere due to its relative contentiousness, as further discussed below. The second thematic category of backstage opinions, secrecy and infinity, refers to the elective affinity between creativity and secrecy in all that concerns Israel's secret military units and, in addition,through the construal of creativity as an infinite source of creative solutions to any number of real-world problems. Both of the thematic categories relate directly to Israel's national contest: the Jewish genius is perhaps the most immediate reference to both elitism and paranoia, while secrecy evokes Israel's
146 mythologized military intelligence and abilities to conduct "secret wars" against the brute force of its enemies within a quality versus quantity paradigm. These are backstage opinions, because the people who possess the relevant information share it only rarely and because they are oriented toward either obscure or (supposedly) infinite discrete backstage arenas. The two related cultural forces, the Jewish genius and the enmeshed secrecy/infinity, are evident in the designation of an esteemed Jewish-Israeli citizenry and intertwined with the admiration of the concept of creativity, since that infinite power and its solutions to any kind of problem are within reach of this cultural elite. They bolster and empower the sense of Israel's safeness and invincibility through their position backstage. Israel and creative Israelis are constructed as capable of accessing limitless and rarefied creative resources, which conceives the notion of the nation-state as protected by an omnipotent guardianship powered by creativity.
The Jewish Genius
The explicit and unequivocal public mention of the myth of the Jewish genius – as an inherent creative and intellectual capacity characterizing the Jewish people and explaining Israel's mighty achievements – is largely absent from discourse at the various public events celebrating Israeli creativity. Nonetheless, references to it are quite common, albeit in different forms, in private interviews and conversations with members of the creative circles as well as with people outside of them. Indeed, in the previous chapter, many informants made reference to Jewish creative superiority in terms of survivalist or selection andevolutionary explanations accounting for the development of cunning – a de-theologized reference to the Jewish genius (if still echoing classical anti-Semitism). This was a fairly widely acknowledged and public viewpoint. In the following sub-chapter I inspect other ethnographic aspects and explanations of the Jewish genius, seeking to answer:how the concept of the Jewish genius is elicited,explained, and accounted for in the field; what interpretations of the Jewish genius can be found; and what discursive or rhetorical elements of this construct relegate it to the backstage of Jewish-Israeli creativity. I begin by addressing the relevant ethnography and the dialectic relations between creativity as a social practice embodied in its limited public manifestations and the privately expressed references to the Jewish genius.
The Jewish Genius as a Parole Mythique
The Jewish genius is ethnographically present as a parole mythique (Barthes, 1957) that permeates many public events and is present,in a subtler form,throughout the entire
147 public sphere. During my fieldwork, I encountered constant reminders, small vignettes of experience heavily reminiscent of the advertisements and other mundane cultural permutations discussed by Barthes. These are associative sums of signifiers and signified –phrases in some cases, visual signs in others – displayed in a multidimensional and nonlinear fashion, which entertain relations of visual proximity. All elicit notions which need not be enunciated in order to be thought by people who share a certain culture. The primary notions are inventiveness (through the display of creative technologies) and Jewishness/Israeliness (through the display of national and religious symbols). Both are precursors to a second-order myth in this field: the Jewish genius. I begin by looking at the simultaneous display of creativity and ethno-religious symbols in events in the public sphere. At a professional exhibition on agriculture and ecology that took place in TelAviv in November 2011, my attention was drawn to a Chabad (a large Hasidic sect) stand that stood out amid the other stands, all presenting new technologies. The stand was operated by two traditionally dressed men who offered religious services to the exhibition attendants (with an obvious preference for men), such as assistance in their daily prayers, selling books, chanting, and engaging in friendly debates with those who approached them. The signs hanging above their stand read "Jewish energy" and "recharging the spiritual battery" (the latter alluding to an invitation for a short prayer with phylacteries). I talked to one of the men, Yair, who explained that his presence at the exhibition was due to the insistence of the co-owner of the venue, himself a Chabadnik, on a "Jewish spot" at the event. At some point during the conversation, I asked Yair for his take on the Jewish genius.He replied:
I see from your questions that you think we do not belong here, or that this [pointing at his stand] and this [gesturing toward the exhibition] are not connected. But for a Chabadnik, nothing is disconnected. A true Chabadnik sees connections everywhere. Look, yesterday there was a conference here about innovation in recyclable energy in which they said that we would be among the top five countries leading that field within a few years. Such a small country! There, I see connection, and I can see it in two ways. If I come from a believer's perspective, then I look at the Torah and it reads: "For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession" [Deut 7:6]. If I believe that the people of Israel have been chosen for a certain purpose, I don't think that God entrusts you with a mission without equipping you with the tools or capacities necessary to complete the mission. And He did give the Jews capacities to do things, better than the Gentiles, whose intelligence I do not disparage, but still better. The Rambam [Maimonides], for example, didn't go to university, he studied the true medicine which we're only beginning to discover
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from the Gemara. The second way of looking at it is from a non-believer's perspective. Jews were historically persecuted, not allowed to own land or be farmers. The Jew never carried around money but rather diamonds, so he could escape at the very last minute. They were traders, and traders are mamzerim [swindlers,literally bastards] and mamzerim are creative.
The Chabad stand (photos by Yoel Tawil). November 2011
Yair's views on heightened Jewish creative and intellectual capacities are addressed belowin comparison to other opinions expressed in interviews. The associative symbolic significance of his pronounced physical presence alongside the actual presence of creative technologies echoed and embodied some of his words. Although this was perhaps the most powerful ethnographic case of an association between Jewishness and innovation, the field was fraught with subtler forms of social configurations with similar meanings. In another instance, in August 2012 I attended a family exhibition called Innovation Inc.at the Jerusalem Science Museum. Shiny, interactive, fun, and conveying ideas of creativity and innovation through creative means (with lots of buttons to push and sensory manipulations for children of all ages to enjoy), the exhibition was spread across two floors and split into four categories (serendipity, alteration, thinking outside the box, and observation). Each category hosted several functional inventions and ideas that shared a basic narrative of creation. Many hallmarks of Israeli innovation were there, chief among them, drip irrigation (Taftafot), 3D sensor technology (PrimeSense), and the USB flash drive alongside lesser-known or new inventions (such as a smart hospital bed able to monitor the vital signs of the occupant). Each invention had a stand next to it providing information via headphones (the inventor's short biography, the invention's history, and its reception and success, measured in the number of units sold,etc.). Every 15 minutes the young tour guides provided information andreviews of six or seven inventions of their choice. Probably due to its location in Jerusalem, the event was heavily attended by nationalist-religious families, all visibly Jewish: men withkippot and beards and women dressed modestly in long skirts and long sleeves. As a secular ethnographer observing the exhibition – specifically while watching a religiousman experiment with the PrimeSense technology by manipulating dots on a
149 computer screen via hand gestures alone – it occurred to me that the very people who were attending the exhibition had the potential, from the perspective of other people, to become part of it. In other words, as with the Chabad stand and its potential to signify Jewishness when in close proximity to innovation, so too the visual configuration of an individual or group of people who are visibly Jewish next to either well-known or lesser- known Israeli inventions can create clear connections between Jewishness and innovation. When this configuration enters the visual field of another visitor in the exhibition, they may call forth the second-order myth of the Jewish genius. In yet another instance, in December of the same year at a professional exhibition sponsored by a big high-tech firm I talked to a man who was running a stand representing a website that provided information about Israeli international successes. He told me about the recent acquisition of a certain Israeli military technology by the Indian Army and about how Israel had managed to outshine competitors in the bidding, both in the quality of the product and in its timely delivery. I asked him how Israel had managed to do this, and the man paused for an instant, looked at me with a smile, and loudly answered, "Jews!" with his arms raised halfway in a gesture that communicated both slight embarrassmentat his own answer and an invitation to look around the room at the crowds standing behind me and in front of him, all presumably Jews though none visibly religious. I asked for an elaboration, but the man politely declined my request. This example shows that the potential linkage between technological innovativeness and religious or national symbols need not be as blunt and forcefully present as in the previous examples but may lie, in terms of communication studies (see Hall, 1980), in the decoder's eyes. The decoder actively samples the signifier of Jewishness from an unintentionally encoded field populated by Jews, hosted in Israel, or occurring in a place where Hebrew fills the auditory space. I observed a similar configuration at an exhibition on innovation in medical equipment that was held in a hotel lobby in northern Israel. Behind the curtains that separated the stands and exhibits, there were touristic artifacts of the type that often characterize hotel lobbies, such as photos of Israel's landscapes, a painting of the Old City of Jerusalem, and an engraving of the Menorah. These were removed from the walls in order to make room for the exhibition and were placed, fairly unaesthetically, in the "dead spots" of the exhibition. They were, nonetheless, still visible to the visitors when moving from stand to stand, thus recreating the visual vignettes of signifiers of innovation alongside signifiers of Jewishness. A more active agency using similar symbols was highlighted in the previous chapter. Because national, religious, and ethnic symbols are inextricably enmeshed in the Israeli cosmology, Jewishness may also be signified through similar symbols that pervade the venues of exhibitions, such as flags (in Moti's medical exhibition) and the symbols present in all educational institutions (including, for example, the summer camp).
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Insofar as the Jewish genius is elicited in the public sphere, particularly in professional exhibitions, two additional ethnographic comments should be made regarding both the immediate and larger context in which this concept emerges. The first relates to gender. Of all creative events, professional exhibitions can be characterized by having the lowest female attendance; few women were found hosting stands, and whenever I inquired about a given product, a man was usually found to satisfy my curiosity. In 11 of the 18 exhibitions the only stands that were entirely operated by women were those offering subscriptions to popular science magazines, journals, and other "light" literature of relevance. The females were relegated the task of dispensing infotainment to spark the male mind into creative action or to provide passive maintenance and fostering of the creators' interest in current trends in creativity and technology – present-day muses perhaps. Stands that displayed technology were staffed by men. The second ethnographic comment relates to beauty and fascination. In all exhibitions there is considerable emphasis on aesthetics, design, lighting, and decoration, which, in a modernist and commercialized context, bring a sense of elegance to the technologies on display, accentuating their status as pinnacles of human progress and objects of fascination. Aside from clever designs of logos or space (such as designing the whole stand of an ecology project as a plastic grove), some exhibitors went to great lengths to provide the visitors with truly remarkable experiences. Near the Chabad stand described earlier, a company providing water irrigation services had set up a giant screen that created a water curtain: the array of water dispensers aligned horizontally were programmed to release water so preciselythat the drops could spell words such as welcome, the name of the company, H2O, and various other symbols. The exhibit, which drew considerable attention, corresponded theoretically with Gell's concept of a technology of enchantment (1992a). In his article, Gell argued that the power of art to inspire a spiritual elevation (a sensation of enchantment) lies in the mystification and only partial understanding of the technical ability that enabled the creation of that work of art.This is important, as many forms of art and decorations in exhibitions differed in this sense from the creative artwork that populates artistically-inclined exhibitions. Based on all these examples, I argue that the Jewish genius, while never being directly and fully addressed in the public sphere, may nevertheless be elicited and lifted from a collective cultural reservoir into the realm of private consciousness through the juxtaposition of signifiers of Jewishness and creative innovation. This is done with various degrees of agency and subtlety. The more significant acts of creating this associative meaning are rooted in the power to actively enforce the presence of nationalist and religious symbols. The more understated evocations of the Jewish genius are rooted in the mere presence of Jews or Jewish symbols in the public sphere, and
151 while formally belonging, they differ significantly from the far more muscular and fleshed-out celebrations of creativity in the frontstage described in Chapter 3. Instead, they relate to the politically unexciting and often involuntary maintenance of nationalism in everyday life and not to intermittent moods or moments of eccentricity (Billig, 1995). Furthermore, insofar as the concept of the Jewish genius is invoked in professional exhibitions in particular and in the public sphere more generally, it is a masculine Jewish genius, preoccupied primarily with innovation and technological creativity. In a modernist-capitalist context, these are embellished by being construed asenchanting objects of fascination, beauty, and desire. The genius that created them basks in their glory.
The Jewish Genius in Interviews: An Explanation for Miraculousness
Yair, the Chabadnik quoted above, referred to the Jewish genius in two ways. First, he referred to Jewish intelligence evolved through historical persecution, a weapon of the weak. This view is part of the publicly shared ethno-national explanation for Israel's impressive achievements, detailedin Chapter 1's literature review. Yair's second reference, to which he, as expected, adhered as a religious person, related to the concept of chosenness and Jewish intellectual and creative superiority as capacities originating beyond rational thought in the mystical and supernatural realm of Jewish liturgy and religious beliefs. In private interviews, secular informants struggled with this aspect of the Jewish genius, demonstrating uncertain and perplexed reactions to this issue. When I interviewed an inventor called Doubi, we discussed his working relations with other gifted and successful inventors abroad, all of them Jewish. When I asked for his thoughts on the Jewish genius, his sudden outburst took me by surprise:
It's a real thing! It's true, of course it's true! It has to be, look at the numbers! There is no nation that can do this, in this line of work, come up with so many things, produce so many brilliant people without having something…What that something exactly is, I don't know, but there is no way it doesn't exist.
I questioned the note of angerin Doubi's response, and he answered:
Because for me it would be like going to a goddamn astrologer or psychic or medium or whatever and have him describe my life in detail, hit all the right spots, and not being able to discover his trick. I don't like psychics and I don't like tricks I can't uncover. I look at Israel's numbers, and apparently there's no trick the psychic has fooled me with. His power is genuine, or should I say seems
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genuine. I don't like to talk about it, but there you go, you wanted me to say that it exists, I said it. You got what you wanted.
Another entrepreneur, Eytan, displayed a similar blend of reluctance and acceptance, albeit in a more restrained and drawn-out fashion:
When I think about it, I feel forced into the explanation. I can't help but think that the people who believe in it have a good reason to do so. What has been going on here in terms of innovation, creativity, technology, research, intellectual ability, historical survival, is really amazing. We are second to no one. So it would be very hard for me to say that something that I can't quite name doesn't exist. The survivalist explanation is overused and is not enough. We are not the only people who have been persecuted, and yet we are the only ones with such achievements.
I asked Eytan why he felt "forced into the explanation." He replied:
Because I don't like it – for several reasons. First, I am a man of science, and I believe in reason. I don't believe in the supernatural. I may believe in some form of higher powers that haven't been elucidated yet but not in the concept of chosenness, because humanist science takes precedence – a science that looks at all people as equals. Second, the Jewish genius brings to my mind those horrible Nazi caricatures and all our folklore that concerns deception and trickery, which is something we should aspire to discard and leave behind. Again, that's the humanist in me who suspects that people who like the Jewish genius may be predisposed to like that too. Third, I have many friends who are not Jews and yetare enormously talented. On the other hand, if I am honest, I must admit that there still is a certain difference between the culture of innovation and creativity here and the one in which my non-Jewish friends live and work. If I am extra honest, then I also have to admit that while some of those non-Jewish friends are indeed enormously talented, some of my Jewish friends are monstrously talented. You can attribute these differences to many factors, but the Jewish genius in some form, I don't even know what I exactly mean by that, it must be one of them. I must consider it precisely, because I am a man of science. Carl Sagan is a personal hero of mine. Now, he was a hardline atheist, but he has that great quote that scientists should be able to change their minds when presented with a convincing argument, unlike religious people.95I must prefer to live with
95The full quote is as follows: "In science it often happens that scientists say, 'you know, that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion." (cited in Poole & Poling, 1998 p.30)
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an uncomfortable possibility that I can't exclude rather than hold on to a truth that suits me. It doesn't mean that I believe it, just that I don't exclude it because I don't fully understand the phenomenon it is referring to. That is the scientists' way. So, in a way, because of my adherence to science, I can't eradicate it from my mind because what we've achieved does not sit comfortably with the explanations I am aware of. It's in the back of my mind and within the realm of possibilities. There is a possibility that something is there, and I won't deny it just because I don't like it.
Beyond my circle of informants, in my personal life, the Jewish genius was an issue that aroused interest and opinions whenever the subject of my research came up. Friends, relatives, acquaintances, or people I had just met often turned to me for an expert opinion, asking whether my research had confirmed or debunked the myth (among them was the world-renowned neurosurgeon who operated on me in 2014 to whom I replied that he had seen more of the Jewish mind/brain than I had). When I threw the question back on them, opinions were varied. My immediate and secular circle either acknowledged the de-theologized interpretation that links the Jewish genius to persecution or displayed strong skepticism about its existence. Older, as well as more traditionally-inclined people, also related Jewish creativity to persecution,but many reiterated the uncertain approach reflected in the words of Doubi and Eytan, which I call the agnostic stance, namely, that the mystical or supernatural may be in some way connected to the Jewish genius. Of my 32 formal interviewees, eight expressed views similar to the agnostic stance, three denied the existence of the Jewish genius in any form, and all but three of the rest (that is, the vast majority) subscribed to the de- theologized version that relates to persecution. In other words, all but three of my interviewees, alongside people outside of my direct fieldwork, acknowledged the connection between Jewishness and elitism in some way. Furthermore, the vast majority agreed that this elitism is indebted to weakness and paranoia, widely accepting the elitism-paranoia nexus. The sense of elitism even pervaded opinions of a more progressive character. For instance,Rikki, a religious woman of my age, shared her opinion, possibly attempting to reconcile chosenness and equality.
The people you've been talking to have got it all wrong. The idea of chosenness, and I'm not the only one who thinks this way, is not an assertion but an invitation. You see, what Hashem (G-d) is trying to do is to get the best out of us. We're not inherently superior by nature to other nations, but by being told that we've been chosen, we have been given a mission or dared to rise as high as possible, spiritually, intellectually, creatively, whatever….It's like when you have children, you don't tell them that they are mediocre, which is their present state, you tell them that they rock, that they’re special, because then they may try to
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achieve this, to meet your expectations and embody the labeling, to act accordingly. That's the real meaning behind it.
When I shared Michal's opinion with Ziv, a psychologist, he said:
That's a great answer! I'll give you the psychological take on this. It's like the research on self-serving illusions and mental health. It has been argued that depressed people have a more accurate perception of reality and that optimism and self-delusion is associated with mental health.96 The thing is that optimism, even if it's wrong or exaggerated, may actually help you get a better performance out of yourself. I am a secular person, and when I try to be especially creative, I should ideally worship myself in an exaggerated fashion, become my own god. When Jews say that they believe that the collective to which they belong is superior to others, theyare doing the exact same thing. It's another way of saying that they believe in themselveswith a slightly distorted but beneficial take on reality. That's the power of self-delusion.
The concept of Jewish genius that acknowledges, either fully or partially, a closer and more straightforward connection to Jewish religion tends to elicit several kinds of positive responses. First, as something that is believed to exist in the most direct sense of the term, as in the case of the Chabadniks and religious people in general, it constructs Jewish creative and intellectual superiority as inherent and indicative of an alliance with the divine andas manifested in the achievements of a certain elite. Second, as something that may exist, as exemplified in the agnostic stance responsesand in my conversations with people outside of the field, the Jewish genius entertains (to an uncertain extent) a mutually vindicating and validating relation with the theme of miraculousness. Finally, as an inspiration, the Jewish genius is an invitation from the divine to try and advance as far as possibletoward an infinite horizon personified by God and to rise above an average norm. All responses (except those that don't acknowledge the existence of the Jewish Genius at all) contain backstage opinions that, aside from validating the elitism-paranoia nexus, also privately support the theme of miraculousness by having been elicited by it and subsequently acknowledged as rooted in the ethno-national exceptionality, embodied by a small group of individuals. Therefore, the myth of the Jewish genius promotes the public claims of the frontstage and undermines the backstage critique that relates to exceptionality but not publicly, thus being both hidden and present in relation to the frontstage.These opinions are certainly not strongly asserted in the public sphere, but their minimal and indirect public
96Ziv was referring primarily to Taylor and Brown's (1988) influential paper entitled "Illusion and Well-Being: A Social Psychological Perspective on Mental Health." Taylor and Brown postulated that overly positive self- evaluations, exaggerated perceptions of control or mastery, and unrealistic optimism may promote the ability to engage in productive and creative work.
155 exposure supports the frontstage to the same extent, albeit not in the same way, that the total absence of the critique does. Being privately-held beliefs, like the agnostic acknowledgement of the Jewish genius, they relate to the two last themes concerning backstage opinions, secrecy and infinity.
Creativity and Industrial and Military Secrecy
As I mentioned in Chapter 1, secrecy, or, alternatively,confidentiality, pervade the field through two related themes. One is the capitalist context with itsWestern-influenced attitude toward creativity, especially in relation to the protection of intellectual property through either legal means or norms of conduct (Leach, 2007; Lubart, 1999). The other concerns the close relations between Israeli high-tech and the military-industrial complex as well as military and paramilitary forces whose work and formation tend to be structurally hidden. The issue of intellectual property appears as both "product-oriented secrecy"– hiding the very fact that a product is in development – and "process-oriented secrecy" – protecting the process of production of new ideas even though the product itself has been revealed in exhibitions. This is similar to what Mitchell (1993) has called"resource- focused tactical secrets," used to conceal information that, if revealed to competitors, might result in the loss of privileged access to valued material assets; in this specific case, this refers to the protection of a certain product or proprietary process that has been developed.This aspect was evident in the reluctance of many exhibitors at the exhibitions I attended to fully elaborate on the narrative of their invention's creation. In one instance, an entrepreneur from the professional sector told me that he always tries to negotiate "black box" conditions for his products and services,meaning that the product should be delivered in such a way that its blueprints or operating mechanisms are not revealed to the employer. However, the matter was most powerfully exemplified to me through the vulnerability of children, when I attended one of the children's inventions exhibitions. Etty, the coordinator and teacher of the young inventors' classes at BeitNatan, and I were going from stand to stand, examining the works on display and comparing those from her school to others. Etty suddenly froze and observed two men on the other side of the room suspiciously. When I asked what was wrong, she explained with anger and dismay that industrial designers often show up at children's exhibitions, mingling discreetly among the families, to "draw inspiration" – i.e., steal ideas – from the children's inventions. This is particularly problematic, as parents and schools fail, as a rule, to provide legal protection for ideas that the children come up with in school activities, regardless of their brilliance. Due to the fact that children's inventions are not protected and that reverse engineering is not difficult (as children's inventions may be inspired but are seldom technically complex), this example, in particular, highlights the
156 importance of process-oriented secrecy as it relates to creativity and innovation in the adult world. It is also a reminder of the child's inherent vulnerability. The second aspect of secrecy is its connection to military secrecy. As mentioned in Chapter 1, Israeli high-tech originated in a symbiotic relationship with the military- industrial complex, and the two still maintain close reciprocal ties. Much of the Israeli technological elite, namely, people of the creative community in general and the geek community in particular, begin their professional formation in the mandatory military service, especially in intelligence units whose work is mostly a well-kept secret. While many continue to work with the army or take its inspiration with themto their civilian careers (combating and preventing cyberwarfare would be a prime example), these people often downplay their military past or mention it only in passing with an enigmatic or apologetic smile in interviews or in instances of public speaking. Shay is a graduate of one of these units,who continued to work for the unit as a civilian consultant. My interview with him took place on a park bench in TelAviv. He was on a break and came out of a building to which I was denied entrance. The interview focused solely on entrepreneurship, and when I asked whether we could talk about what went on in the building behind us (implying espionage), Shay shook his head brusquely without even saying no. Although this was not the only occasion during my fieldwork when an informant refused outright to discuss a given topic, the specific spatial arrangement in which my request was turned down, that is, with my back to a restricted area, constituted a powerful ethnographic vignette of the issue of inaccessibility that stayed with me long after Shay and I parted ways. Not unexpectedly and rather like with the concept of Jewish genius, the Israeli military's secretive activities ignited my informants' imaginations. Their opinions, embodied in a dual approach toward the subject of deep intrigue alongside an understanding of the need for secrecy deriving from a lack of access to relevant materials, mirrored my own ethnographic vignette with Shay. Many of my friends and acquaintances, aware that a large number of my informants were somehow related to intelligence or secret units, shared with me relevant anecdotes or informed me of upcoming TV shows, media reports, articles, or documentaries which revealed some of the secrets of Israeli intelligence (those documentaries never failed to mention that the stories that remain untold far outnumber those that have been uncovered). While some of my circle criticized the fourth estate for "revealing too much," for most it was a subject of intense fascination. After I had conducted an interview, they often asked if an informant had revealed anything "truly interesting."In accordance with the general attitude that fills the media, many of my friends too professed time and again their admiration and curiosity about the ingenious and daring accomplishments of those exceptional individuals who carry out the missions that purportedly ensure Israel's survival.
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On one occasion Max invited an entrepreneur to his class as a guest speaker. The speaker, while telling about his past, insinuated several times that his army unit had conducted joint operations with Israel's secret services. After the lecture, a student complained to me that the speaker "had kept the best stories to himself," but added almost immediately, "maybe it's better that way." In another instance, at an unconference, I was speaking along with several other participants to Avi, an inventor who also served as a consultant to the IDF in the field of robotics. Avi had brought some of his robots to the event. I mentioned to him that I wasquite impressed by the army's achievements in the field of robotics that I had witnessed in professional exhibitions relating to defense. He replied with an enigmatic smile: "yes, what you've seen is impressive, but what you haven't seen is realscience-fiction."Another participant said to Avi, "science-fiction, huh?," timidly inviting elaboration without expecting too much. Avi, obviously relying on the positive mystique of the root metaphor of "modernism and capitalism" nodded and just calmly repeated "science-fiction." The other participant didn't insist, and the conversation moved on to other topics. In other words, outside of the field, the coaction of concealment and very limited disclosure, in which the former mystifies the latter which, in turn, confirms the former, cements Israel's secret activities as well as their structural secrecy as indications of creative fortitude and immense valor for national security. People directly related to secretive intelligence agencies and their activities generally show self-imposed restraint, manifested in a lack of verbal generosity on the subject. However, this does not mean that people with either lower security clearance or completely unassociated with military intelligence did not refer to secret activities in general. I illustrate this issue via four vignettes. At one Garage Geeks event, an entrepreneur speaker talked about the crafty tactics he had used in order to get himself noticed by investors.This reminded Max of a course he had taken in a Jewish-American summer camp in his younger days called "remedial algebra." He told me about it the next morning:
This was, if I remember correctly, in the summer of '69. I was asked to come and replace a counsellor who was recuperating from appendicitis at a HabonimDror summer camp, a socialist-Zionist camp. There was one activity that was called "remedial algebra" which had very little to do with algebra. What I remember from it is that it was a clandestine course, probably off-curriculum, in the sense that having a course called remedial algebra but not teaching it conveys a certain message in itself. The course was like an amateur course for those who wanted to be sleuths, detectives, under the radar, Mossad, and so on and so forth. It was an amateur course for future Mossadniks, ok?… And you learned there how to get away with things, not necessarily by breaking the law, but how to do things
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without being noticed, without making a commotion. Unfortunately, disgusting criminals like the guy who murdered Rabin used the same techniques, so obviously I am not… of course they can be used for evil purposes, but they can also be used, I suppose, for good purposes if the ends justify the means. These means, some are kosher, perhaps some are semi-kosher, or on the border of trefah[non-kosher]. The only thing I remember is that when you look like you know what you are doing or where you are, people assume that you know what you are doing and where you are. Everybody had to do an exercise, and I chose to walk around the camp and go in the bunks, uninvited, unannounced, and steal the caps from all the compression cans, deodorants, shaving cream…I was amazed how simple it is, once you have a certain amount of self-confidence and practice a little bit, to get away with things, to look like you know what you're doing…I'm sure I have used some of these techniques sometime during my life.
In response to my question whether such a course would have happened in a non-Jewish camp, Max replied that he did not know, but when I asked if this story was connected to Jewishness and to the Jewish genius, he answered:
I think it connects to struggle, and it connects with being underground, so I would say that any organization or group, in order to survive, it needs to have some underground activity. And don't forget, we grew up on the Warsaw Ghetto and the Maccabees and the story of Hanukkah, we grew up on stories of clandestine resistance – and clandestine resistance, whichever way you may look at it, makes you smarter. So, yes, I believe that if there is a genius here, it was paid for in ancestral blood, and even more so in the ways we developed to avoid that. As for me, when you go through life, you don't always know what tools you are using from your youth, but in my everyday life, I like to pull people's legs and that's remedial algebra, so it's not all gloomy. I don't remember a lot but I remember this course.
Max referred to cunning and ruse as characteristics of the de-theologized version of the Jewish genius, connected to the near and distant Jewish past, as referred to in Chapter 3. However, he also mentioned them as an amateurish reference to the rumored formation and tactics of Israel's intelligence agencies;he even allowed moral questions to interject his views by maintaining vagueness as to whether cunning is perhaps desirable. For Max, underground (that is, secretive) activities, even if "non-Kosher," are still possibly directly associated with survival and struggle, in both the Jewish past and the Israeli present.
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Another informant, Gal, expressed similar views but allowed himself to elaborate further on the Israeli present. Gal is a blogger who writes on defense-related issues (and had been described by several other informants as relatively well-informed). We freely discussed Israel's well-known military past, but when it came to talking about Israel's present secret activity, Gal interrupted me, typed something on his laptop, turned his computer to me, and said "read." On his screen was an article that I had seen a few months earlier entitled "Top Cadets Scare Me"(2011).It was an interview with Gershon HaCohen, the commander of the military colleges, in which he deplored the army's clumsiness and lostability to think outside the box.He illustrated this critique by recounting the biblical story of Barak's battle with Sisera, in which the former (under the guidance of the prophetess Deborah) defeated the considerably more powerful latter by climbing to the top of Mount Tabor and waiting for the rain and ensuing mud to render Sisera's chariots unusable for battle. HaCohen proclaimed Israel's secret services and special units the true successors to Barak rather than the army (no longer a "small and clever IDF"), which he even recast as Sisera. The overly obedient top cadets, who lack the craft and guileof special and secret units, scare HaCohen, who hopes for more creativity of the kind that, in a military context, uses cunning alongside or in place ofbrute force. In this sense, both HaCohen and Gal reiterated Max's opinion that craftiness and ruse are related to the creativity of classified activity and units, which are designated as the present-day descendants of Jewish shrewdness. After I finished reading the article, Gal embellished these arguments by both revealing and concealing what he seemed to know about the subject matter:
I don't know much, but what I do know I can't share with you. However, I can tell you two things. The first is that these people do amazing things, things you couldn't possibly imagine. The second is that HaCohen is right. I guess I am not telling you anything new when I say that we are currently engaged in a military conflict with Iran. It may not be on the surface, but I assure you that this is, on all counts, an armed conflict, complete with soldiers, armament, strategies, and casualties. And those people are the ones taking part in it. It was the way to survive in past conflicts, and it will also be the way to ensure our survival in all future conflicts, especially considering the numerical asymmetry between Israel and its enemies and the changing landscape of the future battlefield which is becoming less and less based on force and more reliant on creative technologies.
Gal spoke of the Israeli army and even mentioned Iran, but informants, as a rule,avoided referring explicitly to the reason for Israel's need for creative militarism, particularly in relation to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Hence, instances during fieldwork that facilitated such forms of speech are worthy of note. In November 2012, I was due to
160 participate in Mahanet, the unconference of all intelligence units of all the military branches in Israel including secret units. The escalating tension between Israel and Hamas at the time culminated in what went on to be called the Amud Anan (Pillar of Defense) operation, which went on for a total of eight days. Mahanet was cancelled for two reasons. First, it was scheduled to take place in the south of Israel,not far from Gaza, and thus, being in the range of Palestinian rockets, the place was considered too dangerous. Second, many participants were called to their reserve units. I did not manage to get invited to another Mahanet and not attending this unconference was disappointing for my fieldwork. I was informed of the Mahanet's cancellation by an acquaintance in the geek community. Over the phone,I asked whether Mahanet could be just postponed and not completely cancelled, thinking that the military operation would be short. After a short pause, my interlocutor said: "Well this would be a logistic nightmare so it's not going to happen soon, but the sooner it happens, the shorter the next Amud Anan will be." I then asked whether he could at least share with me the contents of previous meetings, to which he responded that since I hadn't been officially invited, he couldn't. He then hung up. In this short interaction it became clear that military creative innovations in relation to techniques gor surveilling Palestinians, are not discussed openly. While events such as Mahanet obviously fertilize the minds of people involved in creative militarism and military industries, this is not usually acknowledged. In this particular case, however, because the cancellation of Mahanet was the result of the military operation Amud Aanan, such a disclosure was unavoidable, thus allowing my interlocutor to hint at the connection between the unconferences and their creative contributions to the military and to military control of the Palestinians (but without revealing the exact nature of this contribution). If Mahanet had taken place as originally planned, this connection would have continued to be blurred and even denied.
During the Birdbrain unconference (see Chapter 3), I was introduced to Mark, an Israeli-American of about 60, involved in promoting teenage entrepreneurship. At one point Mark asked me: "Do you know who the most important people in the room are?" Suspecting I knew the correct answer, I followed his finger pointing at several intelligenceunit cadets who were showing interest in the dressing-up props.
If they can learn to play like that, if they can break any "square" thoughts that may be left in them, then, when they return to their units, they will know no limits, as no one in those units should. Anything they are required to do, any assignment they are given, they will find a way to do it.
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In pointing out the presence of young soldiers from intelligence units, many of whom had only just begun their training (members of the geek community are sometimes involved in organizing unconferences for them), Mark followed Max and Gal by referring directly to the link between heightened security, secretive might, and creativity, to which intelligence units are intrinsically connected. For Mark, the celebration of creativity and unorthodox thinking in the military is deeply connected to the "creator-as-child" model, nurtured by the engagement in creative play of soldiers who are, to a large extent,perceived as children in Israel (Gur, 2005). Even more importantly, Mark accentuatedexplicitly what Max and Gal had hinted at when describing what being creative exactly means; Mark's phrase "knowing no limits" brings up a crucial issue in the perception of creativity, namely,infinity.
Creative Infinity In all the interviews and eventsof my fieldwork, creativity was always implied as an infinite source of ideas. The multitude of creative events celebrates and encourages the ability of creators to constantly come up with new ideas. In accordance with the "creator- as-child" model which motivates unconferences, creativity is conceived as being non- encultured,reflecting the notion that culture imposes limits on creativity and implying that creativity, in itself, is unlimited. Both in the names of the exhibitions and in the posters hanging from the stands, words such as "future," "new," "next", "beyond" were often included, denoting a linear progression in time and promising that new ideas are always waitingto be discovered. In private interviews, running out of ideas was rarely understood as being uncreative but instead as merely being temporarily unable to access other creative realms.It is this aspect which I now explore ethnographically. Inspired by popular perceptions of creativity, Ziv suggested naming our workshop "Endless Ways to Think Differently," as many of the exercises practiced in the workshop reflected that general theme. On one occasion I asked Ziv to administer the workshop on his own so that I could sit aside, observe, and take notes. There were 15 participants in this workshop. To begin with, Ziv chose from our inventory ofwarm- up exercises inspired by the 1968 onwards George Land experiments (in which five-year- old children were found to be significantly more creative than adults). Ziv distributed a piece of paper and a pen to each participant. He then took out a paper cup, showed it to the participants, and said the following:
We are all acquainted with this simple object, right? I'm going to ask you all to write down as many possible uses for a cup, any kind of cup or glass, as you can. Write all of them in a column, one below the other, and the moment it starts to get hard, when you feel you are running out of ideas and you have to think about
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the next one instead of it coming naturally and effortlessly to your mind, stop and draw a line beneath the last sentence.
The exercise began, and after about one or two minutes, most participants had put down their pens;they had come up with between 12 and 20 answers each. Ziv went to the board and drew a rectangle.
Let's assume we all have a box [he points at the rectangle]. When it started to get difficult, you had exhausted all the possibilities you'd been aware of, you had reached the limit of your box. I tend to think that nobody truly steps outside the box. Rather, people who have more options just have a bigger box. What we're going to try to do is to push the boundaries of your own box and begin to include as much as possible of what's outside your box [points outside the rectangle] inside it. When you thought of a cup, what was associated with it for you? Let's try and include what you didn't associate – enlarge the box. Think of as much of the world that surrounds you as you can and every possible aspect of human life and how it relates to a cup: war, childhood, fashion, cooking, nature, research, space, religion, anything.You can also try workingmore methodically: divide them into sub-categories and think how each of them relates to a cup. Tell me about a cup's connectionto childhood – any aspect of childhood.[The participants started to share their ideas: e.g., creating a phone with two plastic cups, drawing circles with it in a geometry class, building sand castles with it, wearing itas a hat.] Tell me about a cup's connection to nature. [The participants again shared their ideas: e.g., using an upside-down cup to catch flies, using it as a small flowerpot, using it to "hear the sea."] Tell me about a cup's connection to religion. [The participants shared ideas: e.g., a Jewish wedding anda Ouija board.]
The participants then continued to write on their own. After a while, Ziv stopped them, pointed to a dot further away from the boundaries of the rectangle, and said: "Now we will take it to the next level. Think of unusual features of a cup that are nevertheless feasible. For example, what would be the use of an exceptionally heavy cup?" One participant suggested: "A cup that serves as a weightlifting device, and sips of the liquid in it are a reward for having lifted it." The participants kept writing and it was clear from the occasional giggle that they were starting to enjoy the process. "Now for the next stage," said Ziv, "you tell me what the next stage is." Several participants suggested thinking of impossible features and using them as inspiration for further uses. Ziv agreed and encouraged them not to be afraid of coming up with silly features or uses. The participants continued to write. Ziv drew a bigger rectangle on the board after each phase. By the end of the third phase of the experiment, Ziv had managed to draw out a
163 total of 40 to 50 responses from each of his exhausted participants. The rectangle on the board, the "box"symbolizing the limits of creative thinking, had expanded significantly, but the remaining space on the board indicated that it could grow even more, in other words, that the options that hadn't been included inside the box were, according to Ziv's worldview, infinite. During a break, one of the participants approached Ziv to thank him and, referring to the last stage of the exercise,shared with us that his personal technique for getting in an inventive mood also involves taking existing products and going to radical and outlandish extremes in order to escape the conventions of mainstream thinking. We ended the workshop by thanking all the participants but especially this last person; tools for creativity elicitation are not always so easily shared by many informants, who often refer to them as their personal tricks of the trade in line with the definition of process- oriented secrecy. This willingness to share their personal creative tools led to the emergence of another category alongside the active pursuit of unusualness depicted above.This category related to relaxation, darkness, and the night-time. Eran, an entrepreneur and a member of the geek community, shared with me his own personal technique for the elicitation of ideas:
I have developed a certain mental imagery which enables me to trick my mind into revealing some of its secrets. During my post-army-service mandatory "big trip," I arrived at the city of Leh in India. There is this huge palace there which is supposed to be one of the main tourist attractions but, like most touristic attractions in India, is quite shabby and unkempt. The building itself is crumbling, and the interior consists of lots of rooms, none of which have lighting. You actually have to show up with your own flashlight if you want to be able to see anything. As soon as you enter the building, each room accesses other rooms, all interesting – various paintings on the walls, differently structured, big jars in the corners, and so on….All is dark, and you can wander endlessly in there, as long as you don't fall into a shaft or something. I brought a flashlight, but most of the time I didn't use it. I loved going from room to room, relying on my other senses, touching, feeling for the wall, relying on the dim light coming from outside. I kept wondering, how many more rooms are there? What will I find in the next one? Where does it end? The place was endless, huge, like a labyrinth – even if you came back to a room you'd already been in, you did not necessarily recognize it. When I came back [to Israel], finished my studies, and started my first entrepreneurial projects, I was in a place where you constantly need good ideas about business models, products, slogans, and so on. I also write poetry and use the same technique [that I developed wandering around the Indian palace], because I believe all your ideas and creativity lie
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within you; your mind has incredible depths but, at the same time, it hides them from you. The "shower moments"97 are not enough;unfortunately, there aren't enough of them. It's all a matter of accessing yourself, discovering yourself. I have my own guided meditation technique. I imagine my mind is this palace in Leh. I enter my mind and I imagine that in every room there is an idea,phrase,word, or little gift, something that I can use, either written on the wall or folded into a papyrus slipped into one of the jars; there simply has to be one, that's a given. I choose which room to go to and imagine that I approach the wall, turn on my flashlight, and read the idea written on it, and there's always something. It's amazing.Most of the time I have no idea what's written before I shine the light on it; it's like shreds of my imagination or tiny clues I leave to myself. Most of it is useless, but there's something, and I move to another room and read what's on that wall, and what's hiding in the corner, and move on to the next room and the next room. And even if I can't use 95% of it, 5% are treasures, and, of course, I also enjoy the process. And the best part is that this palace is endless, precisely because it is dark, it is endless. I can relate to my own experience, my recollection of what it was like being there in the dark and feeling that there was no end to the number of rooms I could access. It was a truly remarkable experience for me, and I use it to, like, structure the chaos of my unconscious, if you will. The mind is endless and the world of ideas is endless; you just have to discover your personal access to it, and I discovered mine in India. I have even upgraded the place, because I imagine it with underground levels, so I can go to floor -1, -2, deeper and deeper. So whenever I need an idea in writing or in business, I go to this place in my mind, and even if I don't find it, I usually find other things.
During my interview with Doubi, the inventor quoted earlier with regards to the Jewish genius, he too was willing to share his personal experiences on this issue. He talked about his affinity for the night, a theme echoed by other informants, and whose energy I could feel in the calm, nocturnal activities of the longer unconferences. Doubi reflected:
My secret is that I work at night. I also work during the day, but my best work is done at night. When I feel that an idea is on its way toward evening, I will stay up that night and wait for it. I have my design studio upstairs and my workshop in the basement. On such a night my shift starts at 9:00 PM and ends at 6:00 AM, the family knows not to interrupt me, and I sit in my studio. The night is my
97"Shower moments" is a phrase commonly used in entrepreneurial circles to refer to flashes of genius that occur in unexpected places and moments, such as in the shower. It is also well-acknowledged in the literature on creativity, in which it refers to creative intuition (see Chapter 2).
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kingdom, the house is mine. There will be no phone calls, no kids running around, no one at the door, no one. The idea usually comes unrefined. If it's an idea about design, I wander around the house with my idea in mind, and I can take as much time as I want, I can talk to myself without the fear of looking foolish, or go down the stairs very slowly….I savor it, I polish the idea for as long as I need before going back to the drawing board. If it's a technical thing, I usually draw designs or focus on other things, and when it comes, I go to the basement to check whether it works; and it's such a kick when you find out that it does! My work shift during the day is interrupted, there's so much more time during the night. To me, there is much more time between 3 and 6 AM than during all of the daytime – it's magical. I can go down, find out that something doesn't work, go back up, think about it, fix it, go down, and I'll still have time left to get some more things done. It's truly magical.
Both the workshop and Eran's technique of creativityelicitation are more proactive than Doubi's method and, in this sense,correspond more with Western conceptions of creativity, namely, "make it happen" rather than Eastern conceptions of "let it happen" (Pope, 2005). However, all three are clearly oriented toward infinity. In the workshop and Eran's technique, the human working mind is perceived as inherently limited unlike the creative infinity realized in the exploration of a space. In the case of the workshop, there is ideally no end to the amount of blank space outside the box that may be included within the box in order to generate new associations and ideas. Every level can be explored exhaustively and beyond every level is a next level. Eran's palace is similarly constructed, with every room leading to another and every floor having an additional floor either above or below it. In Doubi's case, the infinity manifests in the opposite direction. The idea, which seductively informs Doubi of its upcoming arrival in his consciousness, originates in the depths of an unelucidated, mysterious, unstructured space, a realm teeming with more ideas, like the ideas that wait in Eran's dark palace and Ziv's blank space. In Eran's and Doubi's cases, night and darkness are of special importance, and their vastness is highlighted. They connote an epistemologically spacious expanse, for Eran in the numbers of options that can be visited and for Doubi in the pleasantly distorted perception of time that allows for more elasticity and unconventional modes of thought.To paraphrase another Carl Sagan quote, for all informants involved, somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be discovered.
Discussion The non-critical backstage opinions expressed by informants revolve, in my analysis, around three principal themes. The first is the concept of the Jewish genius, with the backstage opinions going beyond the widespread acceptance of genius as having
166 evolved in historical persecution (as depicted in Chapter 3). The second is secrecy, concerning Israel's covert military capacities and the concealment of intellectual property. The third is infinity, namely, the perception of creativity as tantamount to access to an infinite source of new ideas. Through the ensuing analysis, I argue that the interrelatedness and confluence of all three culminate in the construction of an imagined elite, a construction which vindicates Israel's past achievements and is entrusted with its ongoing and future survival. As such, it corresponds with all four constituents of the elitism-paranoia nexus (elitism, paranoia, weakness, and strength). Miraculousness and Jewish genius.I begin this discussion and analysis by addressing the opinions expressed ininterviews about the relations between the theme of miraculousness and the theologized, as well as the de-theologized, concept of the Jewish genius. For this purpose, I observe the choices of theoretical coordinates bearing a political inclination. I refer, in particular, to Kapferer's (1988) use of the terms ontology and ideology in his book Legends of the People, Myths of the State, in which ideology is defined as an active assertion about and interpretation of reality, while ontology refers to the ground upon which the notion of the obvious is built, underneath the level of conscious reflection. Their mutual engagement empowers both, thus resembling the relations between first- and second-order myths in the Barthesian semiology, through which I previously presented the Jewish genius as a parole mythique. According to Kapferer, the ontological myth has the potential for immediate acceptance.The celebrated ethno-national theme of miraculousness (mentioned in Chapter 3)suitsKapferer's notion of ideology, which, in turn,evokes the ontological myth of the Jewish genius. The formulation of the popular ideological significance of miraculousness engages and empowers the potential acceptance of myths and stereotypes of creative and intellectual superiority (elitism). The de-theologized Jewish genius, embedded in an ontology of Jewish historical weakness and Israeli geopolitical inferiority (paranoia and weakness), enjoys this popular acceptance, as shown in both Chapter 3 and the current chapter's ethnography. This is also the case concerning its theologized version accepted by religious people as either providential chosenness or a divine invitation (and permission) to rise to such a level. The prevalent reluctant and qualified acknowledgment of the theologized Jewish genius by more secular informants, referred to previously as the agnostic stance, is more complex. The pre-reflective ontological realm, which includes religious beliefs about Jewish superiority, enters their consciousness too. However, once there, it conflicts with rational thought, as the Jewish genius is regarded as belonging to the realm of religion and magic which are culturally construed for many informants (who consider themselves rational) as catch-all terms for the unconventional, irrational, or just inexplicable – the very opposite of science (Greenwood, 2009). Their rhetorical prudence and obvious signs of discomfort derive from the possibility of the explicit or implicit
167 admission of the divine and magically-inspired interpretations into a context marked primarily by science and technology.This admission is greatly enhanced by the theme of miraculousness disseminated in the public sphere and by creativity's general affinity toward the supernatural, as discussed in Chapter 2. The concept of the Jewish genius is backed by Israel's potent accomplishments, breathing fantastical life from the public sphere into the private sphere, as ideology also reciprocally reinforces ontology. On the other hand,my research on creativity in Israel differs from Kapferer's model in the reluctance, resistance, and uncertainty encountered onacceptance of the myth and thus bears more resemblance to Samuel's (1990) concept of a multi-modal framework. Samuel, an anthropologist who observed a shift in scientific paradigm from seeing knowledge as a mirror (i.e., in terms of oppositions) to viewing it as a map in which some areas are represented and some are not, proposesthat different forms of knowledge can exist side by side and be employed according to their utility. The agnostic stance, in which the Jewish genius is sometimes acknowledged and sometimes neitheraccepted nor refuted, ethnographically exemplifies this model. According to Kapferer, the myth is never divorced from its practice. The people who generate new and creative ideas are designated as the practitioners of the myth. In the context of the Jewish genius, the inventors, entrepreneurs, researchers, and other members of Israel's creative vanguard (elite) responsible for its miraculousness (strength) are indirectly nominated as incarnations of an implicitly racialized (or,at least, de-personalized) talent, either mystical or natural. Regarding racialization, this analysisavoids the full meaning of the term as the ascription of genetic features to a particular group of people, yet I nonetheless contend the relevance of several aspects of racialization. The first relates to the body as the site of racial experience (Fassin, 2011). Whilethe Jewish genius refers to the mind, in Hebrew, it also literally refers to the brain (hamoach hayehudi). The mind is also contrasted with the stereotypical Jew's pitiful body, whether tortured and persecuted or diabolically frail, which was hinted at by several informants, who referred to anti-Semitic notions of compensatory Jewish intelligence. The Jewish body is often marked in the public sphere by the everyday religious clothing that signifies Jewishness. The second important aspect of racialization is the larger sociocultural context of race. Here I rely specifically on Brodkin's (2006) work on Jewishness and racial whiteness, in which she proposed a conceptual distinction between racial assignment and racial identity. People's racial identity, she claimed, is constructed by the people themselves, but this construction occurs within their social racial assignment, namely,popularly held taxonomies and their deployment by those with national power to make them matter economically, politically, and socially to the classified individuals.This racial assignment (which analytically resembles Kapferer's use of the term ideology), insofar as it is related to creativity, refers to the theme of miraculousness.
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The occurrence of miraculousness in an ethno-national context and its possible recruitment to chauvinistic political agendas generally constructs the racial identity of Jews in terms of belonging to a culturally homogenous collective that shares basic ethno- racial feature. This is, in itself, elitist but also includes anelite capable of greater creativity with an increased capacity typically linked to an increased ethno-racialization. In this sense, the Jewish-Israeli self-congratulatory conservative perception of creativity is of an elite that also has an elite. I elaborated above on all the instances in which the concept of the Jewish genius, in its various versions, is generally referred to positively including the widespread recognition of the de-theologized version, the religious reception of the theologized version, and the agnostic stance toward the theologized version. In the context of the practice of the myth and, to a certain extent,racialization, an imagined model of an ethno-national community (Anderson, 1991) based on a popular identification with Jewishness appears. This model consists of a three-leveled hierarchy. The first level comprises Jews of a finite creative ability and includes informants and laypersons who profess their admiration forthe next level, namely, Jews to whom Israel's great achievements are indebted. At the highest level, which is relevant mostly in the theologized form of the Jewish genius, is the Divine, which stands alone in its creative omnipotence and omniscience as well as in its ability to bestow a greater creative capacity upon its chosen. This three-leveled model recurs in the analysis of secrecy and infinity to which I now turn.
Secrecy and infinity.I address secrecy and infinity through two main theoretical coordinates. First, I recall the two epistemological categories of lack of knowledge exemplified by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in his famous speech about the war in Iraq in 2002: "known unknowns"and "unknown unknowns." Second, I build on Benziman's (2011) critique of Goffman’s (1969) definition of secrecy, in which Benziman quoted Goffman on the strategic interaction between the person who hides information and the viewer who is trying to reveal it: Sometimes the subject is interested in preventing the viewer from knowing that he has this information, so he safeguards it. This, of course, is another piece of information that is protected. But this time it is information about information. The latter is what you would call a secret. (Goffman, 1969, as cited in Benziman, 2011, p. 45) Benziman criticized the implied conclusion of Goffman's definition, namely,that for the subject, the real secret is that he has a secret. He claimed, for example, that citizens know that the prime minister has knowledge of Israel’s military plans but not what these plans are; likewise, a person may know that a doctor has knowledge about someone's medical condition and may wonder about it, without knowing the details about the
169 condition (2010, p.46). According to Benziman, it is the content of the secret and not its existence, as Goffman (1969) argued, that is the mystery and a subsequent source of frustration for those who seek to know it. Goffman's definition of a secret is an "unknown unknown," while Benziman's is a "known unknown." I observe that the secrecy in the capitalist context of commercial exhibitions as well as in the case of Israel's secret military activities tends to bea "known unknown," more in line with Benziman's reading of secrecy. In exhibitions, the product develops from an "unknown unknown" to a "known unknown" as it passes into the public "safe space" and, after all precautions have been taken to defend it, is subsequently revealed as intellectual property (if necessary). Nevertheless, the process-oriented secrecy that led to it remains shrouded. Similarly, the rhetorical strategies and structural configurations used to partially reveal and conceal Israel's secretive military units make their existence and some of their feats publicly known, while the processes employed and products at their disposal remain hidden and largely unknown. It has been argued and demonstrated that secrecy serves as a means of social control in a system of power relations and as a means of maintaining a privileged position through the withholding or unequal distribution of knowledge (Piot, 1993; Urban, 1998). The secret is hierarchically more prestigious than truth (Bellman, 1981), and the exclusivity that secrecy entails connotes superiority, denotes separation, and constructs elites who are commonly thought to act in a discrete backstage arena that is invisible to non-elites (Marcus, 1983). Whenever exhibited, brilliant commercial ideas contribute to the perceived superiority of the private and secluded minds and the processes from which they sprang, especially in a cultural atmosphere shaped by the celebration of miraculousness. Secret and exclusive sectors within a given society are traditionally entrusted with theprotection of the society (Bellman, 1981; Urban, 1997). Similarly, Israel's secret military units are concealed from the public, popularly characterized by creativity and cunning, and believed to work by way of deceptionas the descendants of Jewish ruse and underground activity to ensure survival. They thus complement the notion of elites, simultaneously known and unknown. The system of social power relations within which they are structured is twofold. First, it is established in the popular admiration and curiosity directed toward unscrutinized and opaque governmental entities as part of the militaristic lore and in the entrustment of the nation- stateto their hands (and their modus operandi). Second, since to keep a secret creates the sense of the secret's power without the need for its demonstration (Luhrmann, 1989), this mystifying opacity is itself protected by secrecy. Creative infinity is a "known unknown" (i.e.,it is known to exist) fraught with "unknown unknowns,"namely, unexpected constituents (expected to be beneficial). Analytically, secrecy and infinity are enmeshed: secrecy denotes infinite possibilities, and the depths of infinity withhold secrets. In Eco's (1984) terms, creativity (as related to
170 infinity) is constructed as an indefinite semiotic sign, a symbol endlessly rich in meaning to which the inexhaustible explorations of unknown realms looking to uncover ideas are subsumed – as shown in the earlier ethnographic examples presenting creativity as endless. Its conceptual infinity is further enhanced by the state of mind from which it is being explored,a state of mind that I identifywith Sartre's treatment of the psychology of the imagination (Sartre, 1940/2004). I am referring particularly to the human relationship to art, since besides sharing an elevated cultural status and a leitmotif of inspiration, both art and creativity also belong to the same semantic network (e.g., the creative arts). Sartre contended that an object of art is an "unreality," not only in the sense that it does not actually duplicate the original form of its intended subject but also in the sense that a person contemplating a work of art enters a state of imaginary reflection that includes the projection of their own personal psychology onto the object. Likewise, the concept of "creativity" is never creativity itself. Rather, the human revelation and exegesis of the "known unknown" depths of creativity – which, in their infinity, promise "unknown unknowns" – entail an imaginary process interchangeable with "creativity." During this process the observer may endow a symbol, namely creativity, with any meaning and, furthermore, explore its own psychology. In the creative techniques, this last issue was demonstrated in the informants' attempts to reveal their own hidden knowledge to themselves. In the theologized Jewish genius, primarily in the version in which the term serves as an inspiration, engaging in the exegesis of unknowns under the symbolic patronage of God could be a religious creative discourse but also a poetic expression of the infinite capacity attributed to human consciousness. In the attribution of creativity to Israel's secret military units, creativity serves as both a hermeneutical process, a basic human response to incomplete data, that is, thinking creatively about the "known unknown" or the secret,and the final projective category of that hermeneutic process, that is, concluding that these units are not merely creative occasionally but rather endlessly. By endlessly creative, I am relating specifically to two phrases from the ethnography: "knowing no limits" – a state to which intelligence units cadets should aspire; and "things you couldn't possibly imagine" –the actions carried out by a persona who could be called the fighter-spy, the cunning warrior, the Jew who is both strong and paranoid and thus relies on their intellectual elitism. In other words, creativity can become a category that regards itself as an indefinite sign, filled with endless possibilities which, in the context of security, possesses an explanatory value, needing no clarification, about the means through which Israel's unlikely survival will be achieved. As in the case of the Jewish genius, the various ethnographic instances relating to secrecy and infinity and their analysis also suggest a three-level hierarchical model of creative capacities. The first level includes the somewhat self-evident category of "known knowns," or information accessible to anyone in the public sphere or in a state
171 of mind that doesn't strive for creativity, for example,exposed commercial ideas, obvious answers devoid of originality to creative questions, and divulged secrets. This level is inferior to the next, the domain of the "known unknowns," according to Benziman's (2010) definition of secrecy. This level includes both the unelucidated brilliance of inventors who keep their inventions' history to themselves and the restricted backstage arena behind Israel's reassuring secretive mythologized might. Both constitute a creative elite about which people without access can fantasize. The third and final level, to which all aspire, refers to creativity as creative infinity, a "known unknown" that includes "unknown unknowns." This level of creativity means that even the most creative in their efforts to receive epiphanies and break through mental barriersstill have their own infinities to explore. In this sense, the elites are never superior to creativity as an ideal in its purest, unadulterated form. The implications of this three-level model as relating both to the Jewish genius and to secrecy and infinity are addressed below.
Conclusion: Backstage Critique and Omnipotent Guardianship In this chapter, I have discussed the backstage of Jewish-Israeli creativity as well as its relations with the frontstage, from which it is ultimately inseparable. I presented two major themes relating to these backstage opinions: the critical opinions and the uncritical opinions which are connected to a heightened sense of creative capacity and guardianship. I now address the issue of the dark side of creativity both as a suppressed critique and as a reflection on the power of opinions about creativity insofar as they are privately held or refer to an undisclosed and inaccessible backstage. Relating back to the questions raised at the beginning of this chapter, I begin with the backstage critique. As previously demonstrated, all the root metaphors presented in Chapter 2's theoretical roadmap and the two primary themes promulgated in the public sphere (namely, miraculousness and childlikeness), are criticized by privately-held beliefs expressed by the same group of informants who partake in the public celebrations. Alongside its benefits,childlikeness may also include a sense of parental abandonment on the part of the state, risky or reckless states of mind due to the child's creative fantasy, and negligence or lack of long-term planning, which may be perceived as dangerous for the nation-state. As for miraculousness, some informants expressed their doubts about the widely acknowledged position that Israel's achievements are miraculous and, instead, proposed more realistic approaches to explain these achievements with varying degrees of urgency. The ethnographic findings indicated a critique of the current model of negative creativity. They suggested a different model in which positive and negative creativity are not disconnected temporally, socially, spatially, or in terms of their goals and moral value. More importantly, I linked positive creativity to its tendency to inform negative creativity without bearing any relation to positive creativity's particular instrumental
172 products or ideology but rather by virtue of being positive in and of itself. By this I mean that the positiveness with which creativity is imbued as a social construct casts a negative shadow, generating negative or pathologically positive creativity. Finally, I noted that the power of creativity's positiveness contradicts and even cancels out the critiques of creativity. This is regardless of whether these are critiques relating to the root metaphor of "God in man," especially in the "creator-as-child" model, or any other critiques of root metaphors that support or celebrate above average creative abilities in terms of individual talent, successful capitalistic,entrepreneurial endeavors, or the ability to transcend struggle and hardship that is characteristic of the theme of miraculousness and of the Zionist elitism-paranoia nexus.All critiques can be and are drowned out by the very positiveness they criticize. This led to my argument that this positive creativity can be protected by the ability of creativity's positiveness to stifle alternatives and silence the discursive options that counter those dictated by the hegemonic discourse. In this regard, the relationship of the lit side to the dark is one of suppression. The knowledge and narratives that informantsexpressed in private remain subjugated to their configurational peripherality because of the power of creativity's positiveness to preempt the alternatives that are incompatible with the options it promulgates. The concept of the dark side of creativity thereby refers both to negative creativity and to the inequality of the power of expression, in which the denouncing of creativity remains in a metaphorical discursive obscurity. The absolute absence of malevolent creativity should also be mentioned and acknowledged here. Throughout my fieldwork, I did not encounter a single feature that was referred to by my informants, even in their harshest critiques, as evil or malevolent creativity;I was indeed following silence (see Chapter 1). This was true also in some of the arenas in which I wasn't necessarily interacting with people, such as in the following instance. In March 2012, I attended my second military exhibition. While walking along the stands and taking notes, I noticed that there were no weapons on display whatsoever. The exhibition focused solely on innovative, new, and improved military equipment, such as clothing, night vision, virtual reality training, the provision of Israeli expertise to other countries, vehicles, and robotics. Although I had not expected an open and unclassified, albeit professional, military exhibition to showcase weaponry in the traditional sense of the term, one thing was worthy of note.Around the exhibition hall,plastic toy rifles and hand grenades were hanging from the walls and stands as decoration. The choice was intriguing;while the exhibitioners were not denying that military equals war,the functional equipment that was actually being promoted was mostly protective and fairly inoffensive.The only aggressive arms were innocuous, not functional toys. I saw this particular configuration as a material echo of most of the informants' willingness to relate creativity or technological innovation not in the sense
173 of military attacks but only the needs of defense and surveillance. The irony was even more pronounced by this being a military exhibition. The possibility that the democratic state authority is a perpetrator of malevolent creativity, especially in the context of Israel's ethno-nationalist moral failures, ongoing colonial practices and adherence to hardline (and even creative) militarism had no reference as a field of knowledge. In other words, in Israel, there is no malevolent creativityby the nation-state insofar as my informants were concerned. Aside from "softer" and largely legitimized references to cunning and ruse, Satan's dark and nefarious forces found no voice in their words. Rather, they presented a viewpoint consistent with the statement by Cropley (1992) mentioned in Chapter 2 about the general unwillingness to diagnose creativity as malevolent (i.e., deliberately meant to harm others). This (dis)inclination can only be reinforced by and possibly attributed to the moral value of the concept of creativity, instilled with beneficial and benevolent positiveness. Cropley's statementas manifested throughout the field, especially as it relates to the Jewish-Israeli context, serves as the departure point for a much-needed critical set of detailed comments about the local dark side of creativity which is the focus of the final chapter. The non-critical backstage opinions were comprised of references to the Jewish genius (theologized and de-theologized) and to the interrelated issues of secrecy and infinity. I addressed one de-theologized version of the Jewish genius, which is widely acknowledged and enjoys popular acceptance in the frontstage. This referred to Jewish creative superiority originating in historical Jewish weakness and later morphing into Israeli geopolitical inferiority. I also dealt with three theologized or semi-theologized versions – the believing stance, the agnostic stance, and the call to greatness –which are less evident in the public sphere.I argued that the qualified and occasional backstage acceptance of the Jewish genius implies a three-level model of hierarchy and entertains a mutually vindicating and validating relation with the frontstage – especially with the theme of miraculousness according to which Israel's accomplishments can be attributed in some form to the Jewish genius. The three-level model comprises two higher levels or categories of Jewish genius(es) and the theological divine entity related to these, standing above a large and normal Jewish collective–an ethno-national and somewhat ethno-racialized exclusive group. This hierarchy may be fantasized about, and its upper echelons entrusted with the continuity of spectacular achievements by Jews and Israelis in the future. Similarly, I asserted that this three-tiered hierarchy is also relevant to secrecy and infinity. Secret types –i.e., people who possess a certain unelucidated creative ability in a technological-capitalist cosmology –personify the Jewish genius in this sense. So too does the secrecy that surrounds Israel's secret military units, which are closely associated with the military-industrial complex, and the many entrepreneurial achievements in geek and professional circles. Secret units and the Jewish genius are the
174 subjects of enthusiastic popular imagination and frustrated fantasy in which they are ascribed creativity as their modus operandi in the broadest sense of the term (for example, including deception and craftiness). This modus operandi, believed to contribute to Israel's survival, plugs into the Jewish-Israeli elitism-paranoia nexus, as it acknowledges the strength of creativity while crediting it either to the powerless Jewish body (or polity) or to protective military actions overtly characterized by cunning and ruse, weapons of the weak in a war carried out by the fighter-spy. Secrecy as enmeshed with infinity constitutes the third level of the secrecy- infinity hierarchy. In all cases that relate to infinity, such as those exemplified ethnographically in the techniques of creativity enhancement, the interplay between darkness and light could be observed. Ideas, associations, and solutions were drawn from a dark unknown and emerged into consciousness. This interplay, and especially the opacity of the dark and the inaccessibility of its entirety (or, conversely, the constantly shifting accessibility to parts of it), form an ethnographic rendition of the "God-in-man" root metaphor depicted in Chapter 2's theoretical roadmap. From a theological perspective, an omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent deity, like that of the monotheistic tradition, is infinity, both in scope and potency. In its secularized version, prominent creative figures (elites), as well the mysteries of human psychology, namely, those referring to unconscious processes (those too virtually infinite), have historically replaced the mysteries of religion and God as explanations of human creativity. The substantial positiveness of infinity thereby derives from the promise of finding out whatever is being sought by anyone who either entertains a relation with or embarks on a journey into an inexhaustible realm of inquisitiveness and ideas. It can also derive from the admiration of human elites when construed as creatively superior. There are parallels between the three-level hierarchies in both models. In both, the larger group – which, from an ethno-national perspective, belongs to the Jewish genius or is protected by the secret types – refers to the Jewish-Israeli collective; the collective is both implicitly and directly assured the protection of elite groups that are characterized either by Jewish genius or by creative and undisclosed crafty tactics and stratagems. The latter two categories are largely inspired by much greater forces, and, by the same logic, a parallel can be drawn between a God-like state and creative infinity. Both are omniscient and possess the potential to be omnipotent or, at least for many informants and laypersons in general, are believed to hold the promise of omnipotence should they be actualized. The second and third levels of the hierarchy have the capacity to offer the first level an all-powerful guardianship, especially for those who are subjected to a socialization in which these two categories are indeed construed as protective,instead, perhaps, of a more critical stance that would view them as a system of social control.
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In contrast to the way in which childlikeness and miraculousness converge as they pervade the public frontstage of Israeli creativity, the backstage critique and backstage opinions – as they relate to creativity's positiveness and to the frontstage – do not interlock. Rather, each separately supports the Jewish-Zionist elitism-paranoia nexus and, in particular,the theme of miraculousness:the backstage critique through what I call its hidden absence, and the non-critical backstage opinions through what I call its hidden presence. The former supports the narrative of miraculousness and the celebrations of ethno-national creativityin terms of both the "creator-as-child" model and miraculousness, precisely by being subjugated to the positiveness-powered public discourse and by being silenced and pushed away from its centrality. The latter offer the frontstage another kind of support, characterized by the movement of merely pointing toward a backstage (rather than bringing it forward);it remains, for the most part, privately held, apologetic, hidden, or based on incomplete data that is filled in with creative fantasy. The insinuation of the Jewish genius, the seductive and exciting secrecy surrounding the unorthodox military mystique, and the endlessness of creative God-like infinity bring additional support to the predominant themes of the public sphere, particularly miraculousness, that is, Israel's achievements and expected economic and military future. These enjoy an additional layer of protection from critical viewpoints, which leads to their predominance in the Jewish-Israeli public sphere,due to the support from the Jewish genius and from secrecy and infinity which, by their "dark" nature, cannot be openly debated, subjected to examination and close scrutiny, proven, or disproven. In conclusion, I have shown that the dark side of creativity can refer to to the production of negative creativity in the straightforward sense of the term by creativity's positiveness. I have also discussed the power of creativity's positiveness to hinder critique and shown that, to the extent that the critique is positive, this suppression is of a negative character. This chapter furthermore contributed to a different perspective on the term "dark." There are hidden positions and opinions that are obscure, not due to be being immoral or irrational but to being confined to a private sphere, controversial, socially structured within secrecy, or belonging to the depths of infinite realms. They are not necessarily negative or malevolent but are quite firmly entrenched in creativity's positiveness, especially through the "God in man" root metaphor; their very embeddedness in secrecy constitutes their considerable, but not absolute, affinity toward positiveness which, in turn, may engage in a dialectical relationship with other public and positive concepts and the two other root metaphors and thus inflate their own status. An endlessly inventive mind can innovate anything within the context of "modernism and capitalism." An endlessly cunning mind is bound to find innumerable ways to ensure the safety of the nation-state within the context of "struggle, resistance, and agency."Thinking in those terms is, according to some informants, dangerous.
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A Prologue to Chapter 5 Proceeding to the final chapter requires a short elaboration that relates to what this chapter has (and hasn't) been able to discuss. Indeed, Chapter 4 completed the presentation of the ethnography upon which this dissertation is based. From a methodological standpoint, it reflected the advantages of the trust and intimacy the ethnographer builds overtime with informants, enabling the elicitation of more mature and complex approaches and opinions to creativity. However, it also clearly delineated the limitations of discourse.Informants were willing to formulate critiques of childlikeness and miraculousness as they relate to the elitism-paranoia nexus, but only in a way that does not fundamentally endanger an arguably conservative political reading of that nexus. In other words,they would expressonlythat Israel is in constant need of creative protection from harm, either creative or non-creative,but never that Israel causes or threatens any kind of creative harm that is not required, and therefore justified, for its protection. Omnipotent guardianship was even more compliant with this reading. The dark does not necessarily denote evil. In those cases, the mythology of the ethnos,whether referring to the Jewish genius, the fighter-spy persona, or creative infinity, benefits greatly from opacity.Such opacity enhances creativity's presence as it relates to the individual creator as a source of inspiration or as a (perhaps deceptive) mass comforter in the face of danger – or as both. Although these are critiques, it seems to me that the critique presented by the informants, either in the hidden presence of the backstage critique or in the hidden presence of omnipotent capabilities, is relatively mild. This,in itself, is a finding that is acknowledged throughout Chapters 3 and 4. Nevertheless, any work that seeks an evaluation of creativity's impact on the moralities of the Jewish-Israeli national context necessitates a more profound and bolder exploration of darker shadows. Therefore, the last chapter is not a summary but anindispensable complement that relates to the darker side of Jewish-Israeli creativity, the repressed absent against which according to, Derrida, the present is counterposed. It is inspired by my own methodological remarks at the beginning of Chapter 1 about the virtual inaccessibility of politically-charged issues, in which Palestinian creativity is referred to indirectly either as inexistent, irrelevant, incompetent or as the threat from which Jewish-Israeli creativity protects itself, andabout the absence from the field of the democratic state authority as a perpetrator of malevolent creativity. My informants' harsh critiques denounced some aspects of Israeli incompetence or exaggerated hubris but didnot refer to the consequences of malevolent creativity. These are discussed in the final chapter of this dissertation. The theoretical transition to the last chapter is therefore also related to the concept of différance. It entertains a play of similarities and differences with Chapters 3 and 4. It relates to them by building in part on the ethnography and by addressing discourses which underpin my empirical findings: Israel's recent history and
177 the principal doctrines that inform Israel's political agenda today. However, it differs in its evocation ofcynicism, malevolence, injustice, and pain and by beinglocated away from both from both the frontstage and the backstage by not being based on the ethnographic text reaped from fieldwork but by relating to repressed themes and discourses.Insofar as the ethnography is concerned, it summons an absence of absence. According to Nuyen (1987), deconstruction is not an act of destruction but serves instead to create other instruments of writing and of understanding social phenomena (which, in time, will be deconstructed). I conjure up these repressed themes via a theoretical instrumental construct based on a deconstructionist understanding of the ethnography that I have termed "cultural reverence."
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Chapter 5: Cultural Reverence and Social Critique: Concluding Reflections
Introduction When I first took an interest in creativity in 2010, the concept already enjoyed great popularity and was considered a culturally and academically vital feature of the twenty- first century. This tendency has only continued to grow,and creativity has never been more positive. The number of books, seminars, lectures, and entire courses on the subject has grown exponentially as have the number of industries referring to themselves as creative in some way. Creativity is increasingly implemented in school curricula, and politicians promise (or deplore the absence of) "creative solutions" to multifarious issues. At the same time, the present-day political agenda, on a world scale and not least in Israel, shows a disquieting populist-nationalist, ultra-capitalist, and anti-egalitarian tendency toward cultural seclusion, relying on idioms that may quickly become objects of cultural reverence, idioms that are all-important, all-encompassing, integrative, exceptionally powerful, quasi-synonymous with Benedict's (1935) "genius of culture," and conservative. In Israel (at least for some domains and some people), creativity has become central.The aim of this work and particularly this chapter is therefore to provide a critical analysis of the concept of creativity as a singularly positive concept that in its traditional and fragmented interpretation does not pay much attention to any dangerous consequences, particularly in narcissistic national discourses, including technological, scientific, and military contexts.
Culturally-revered idioms and the concept of creativity in this case must be approached with doubt if not suspicion, resolute knowledge, and a powerfully critical mindset (this itself is one possible definition of creativity). I do not propose to "dialectize" creativity or cultural reverence. Rather, I suggest maintaining a strong awareness and a discussion relating to its negative or thanatic constituents – those intrinsic to its quasi-mystical radiance. The unique fusion of the cultural reverence of creativity in the present-day Jewish-Israeli national culture solicits an indulgence and admiration of creativity, a consoling elitism in the face of paranoia,supposedly free of thanatic modes of thought and behavior, perhaps as a welcome mass opiate. It is here precisely that the danger of creativity's positiveness lies, insofar as Israel's already endangered democracy and long-term sustainability is concerned. Throughout this dissertation, I have provided an ethnography-based analysis of the discourses and practices informing the social and moral orders through which the concept of creativity is construed in the Jewish-Israeli national context. I have argued that, in this specific context, despite its multivocality, the concept of creativity is revered, celebrated, and infused with unequivocal positiveness. The fact that the main
179 discourse of creativity in Israel highlights the positiveness of creativity and downplays its negative or dangerous aspects attest to its partiality in people's talk when asked to think about creativity. Inspired by Derrida's différance, I refer to this cultural phenomenon as a concept that is not a "whole" , meaning that that the absent negative constituents must be questioned at least by the ethnographer of such a discourse. The negative possibilities of creativity are and always will be part of the concept's full meaning, even in hidden or repressed form.This is, of course, part of a discursive tendency that goes beyond the local Jewish-Israeli context, as shown in Chapter 2. There, I followed the deconstructive approach that highlights the différance, pointing at what was hidden from speech as well as the celebrated positive meaning of creativity.The suppression of satanic forces in creativity's association with God, the downplayed regressions in progress, and the temporal relation between pain and pleasure (the latter often being a reward in the present for having endured the former in the past) were summarized in the three root metaphors presented in Chapter 2. Following Derrida, I offered in these root metaphors a theoretical analysis of negativity's "absence in the presence." Linguistically, and therefore psychically, that which is denied always already exists. These root metaphors provided the infrastructure for my theoretical roadmap as I was analyzing my ethnographic data. For example, in Chapter 3, the frontstage of creativity as a cultural resource, I showed how creativity celebrated as "childlikeness" marks the absence of adulthood and miraculousness marks the absence of normalcy and natural laws. In Chapter 4 I showed how creativity's celebration in the public frontstage necessitates the suppression of critical opinions expressed in the private backstage and how the reassuring promise of omnipotence requires the absence of certainty regarding what creativity can or cannot do. My extensive consideration of absence throughout the chapters opened up the opportunity to address two interconnected methods: first,what my interlocutors mentioned and second,what they didn't. In the former I followed the anthropological tradition laid out by Geertz, Rabinow, Herzfeld, and many others, which highlights the ethnographer's commitment to their informants' "truths" about themselves. The ethnographic nature of this work and the presentation of the empirical findings were guided by my obligation to provide an account of the prevalent heterogeneous and multifaceted (and indeed sometimes contradictory) modes of human thought and behavior that characterize Israeli Jews as creators and appraisers of creativity. At the same time, according to the tradition of critical thinking, meanings always encompass not only what one says but also what one hides either consciously or unconsciously. Critical theories, deconstruction among them, seek to understand the working of social mechanisms underlying common sense – to use Herzfeld's (1997) term – even when this common sense is expressed indirectly by certain linguistic forms and gestures.To that end, my search for the "unknown in the known,"called attention to the
180 exclusion of Arabs from the community of creative minds and to the fact that when Arabs were mentioned, it was only in the context of threat and how this threat can be countered by creativity. Furthermore, the potential danger of creative ideas, particularly in the military context, was clearly repressed and thus omitted from the direct talk on the concept of creativity, yet hinted at (sometimes with a wink) when participants mentioned the importance of Jewish-Israeli creativity in reference to the surrounding Arab population and geopolitical dangers Creativity wields power which mobilizes economic, social, or political forces, but sometimes the consequences of creative ideasgo awry and create unjust social consequences. These consequences are nevertheless part of the concept of creativity, even when they were ignored, denied, or repressed by my informants. Therefore, in the tradition of critical theory, understanding often goes beyond (but not without) the reality of fieldwork per se;specifically, in the cases in which speech was resisted. In politically- charged issues, there lies a disruption or a conflictual configuration of an otherwise elegant portrait which offers an opportunity for commentary and interpretation (Van Wyk, 1993;Watkin, 2009). I do not argue with the truth of my informants,nor do I belittle their lived phenomenologies. Rather, I argue that they are not self-sufficient.Following my informants' clues, I was able to construe and question the lack of recognized connections,for example, between Israel's control of the Palestinians and Jewish-Israeli creativity.This is, perhaps,a direction for a future study.
Regarding my theoretical framework in this chapter, I wish to emphasize two critical components. The first regards my theoretical contribution to sociological and anthropological research on creativity by adding the concept of "cultural reverence." The second is a critique of Israel's culture of creativity based on my fieldworkand the methodological approach I have laid out above. These two goals come together in the presentation of "cultural reverence." I define cultural reverence as a heightened sense of esteem of a community or some of its members for any cultural item, capacity, or ideal to which they should aspire or their admiration for a designated group of people (or individuals) who are believed to embody better than others whatever is revered. This term clearly refers to an abstraction of this dissertation's findings, and the social treatment to which the concept of creativity has been subjected in Jewish-Israeli culture (as depicted in the ethnography) can be subsumed to it. Though it may be self-evident, I should state that since I view reverence as somewhat contradictory to critical thinking,I present cultural reverence not only through its intrinsic and abstract qualities but also by pointing out the dangers that the reverence of creativity may pose and referring to it in relation to politically charged issues in Israel. These issues are reinforced by the prevalent socio-political ideological tendencies and positions in Israel today, and, given the global interest in creativity, this political structure must be understood as directly
181 influenced by the effects of globalization (Ram, 2003, 2007). In the case of creativity and Zionism, they refer to a tribal, "neo-" or "pro-" adaptation of the "post-" or "anti-" globalized cultural idiom,that is, the enlistment of creativity to conservative and chauvinistic political agendas. These agendas themselves can be identified even more clearly by referring toYiftachel's (2006) three-part concept of "ethnocracy": the ongoing formation of a settler society, in other words,the Judaization and de-Arabization of the homeland; the mobilizing power of ethno-nationalism; and the ethnic logic of capital – in this case the extent of the legitimacy of entrepreneurship as an acceptable moral economy. The issues that are informed by these larger themes are the focus of my ensuing critique. In short, in this chapter I use the initial deconstructionist critical thought of the previous chapters to shape a more abstract and theoretically fertile term: "cultural reverence." While constructing and explaining the concept, I redirect it to the ethnographic themes from which it sprang and their broader sociocultural context, shedding some additional critical light on the historical junction atwhich Israel stands today. Through the elaboration of the term and the critical comments it implies, this concluding chapter carries on theargument in favor of expanding the concept of creativity into a more organic one that would include all its cultural moral multiplicities and creative interpretations in lieu of a singled-out fragmented meaning that denotes only flat positiveness and a reverential approach. This accessibility to multiple meanings would enable amore critical approach that looks also at the negative aspects of both creative processes and products.
Defining Cultural Reverence Before beginning the exploration of the cultural power of reverence, it should be noted that although the object of cultural reverence explored in this research was specifically Jewish-Israeli creativity (and creativity in general),this is, of course, only one potential example. A wide array of emotions, ideologies, and other cultural items can be explored in the same fashion in different cultural contexts and at different times;for example, truth, committed scholarship, decency or morality, financial success, ecological awareness, patriotism, obedience and loyalty, faith, love, cult of personality, and many others may be objects of reverence in various cultural contexts, even deconstruction itself. In addition,the reverence of creativity has been explored in all the previous chapters through its positiveness and its subsequent relationship to tribal elitism and paranoia. This was the departure point for my thematic and theoretical exploration. However, it does not end there, and it is therefore important to formulate a clear distinction between positiveness and reverence, as the latter constitutes a theoretical contribution rooted in a somewhat "purer," less culturally endemic, and more philosophical realm. Positiveness is the impetus of cultural reverence. It is a diffuse and
182 disparate social manifestation across several domains of reference, such as the various cultural strands that shape creativity's positiveness. These can be more general and global, such as positive psychology and self-actualization, economic benefits of creative industries, and various forms of resistance. They can also be more local, such as the Jewish genius mythology, the "start-up nation" or "making the desert bloom" idioms, and Israel's prestige in the field of espionage and creative warfare. Cultural reverence is different;the culturally revered item is a more abstract phenomenon which has a social life and impact in and of itself and can be deemed worthy of admiration even if evoked in isolation from a particular field of knowledge, activity, or purpose to which it is nonetheless related. While positiveness is comprised of a system of signs that operate in relation to other signs and to one another, I follow Lacan's thought in order to explain the culturally revered item. The culturally revered is a master-signifier. I am referring here to an idealized image which is extrapolated from all the array of signs that point to it and which assumes the representation of their totality. It requires no further proof of its existence nor does it acknowledge a higher authority than itself in all matters that relate to it. As Lacan (1993) explained: "Everything radiates out from and is organized around this signifier. It is the point of convergence that enables everything that happens in discourse to be situated" (p. 268). The empirical findings presented in the earlier ethnographic chapters mediated between the myriad signs of positiveness and cultural reverence. They demonstrated that seemingly unrelated root metaphors composed of the eclectic academic literature about creativity are actually interconnected, as soon as they are empirically contextualized in the discourses and practices within the field of creativity in Israel, and that all point at creativity. Creativity is the master-signifier, the concept that, as Bracher (1994) asserted, halts the descriptive and explanatory cascade, provides it with a point of fixity, and grounds it in authority. The master-signifier therefore fashions a sense of cultural legibility out of a set of indeterminate and disparate discursive components, in other words,it invokes order through its ability to inspire a centripetal order. Going back to cultural reverence, the applicability of creativity is so all-encompassing that it overshadows the concepts upon which it is predicated. Their positive specificity is replaced by a more, if not totally, idealized and non-concrete reverence. Creativity's exact meaning at this point becomes more nebulous, but its lofty nature is strengthened. Cultural reverence is not, therefore,a fragmented series of cultural manifestations but a cultural manifestation in itself. It is also somewhat freer from moral considerations that would "burden" it in a lesser form;for example, "technology" is more contestable than "creativity" just as "marriage" is more contestable than "love" or "devotion" and "religion" more than "faith" or "God." Below I identify five theoretically fertile abstract features that characterize cultural reverence and explore them in depth: moral purity, thematic hierarchy,
183 compulsory pleasure, cultural mashups, and confidence. These features are inextricably linked. Although they are presented in a roughly chronological fashion as they relate to creativity in the specific Jewish-Israeli national context, I elaborate on their interconnectivity and the ways in which they affect one another. In order to provide them with a theoretical anchor to Lacan's master-signifier, I rely on ideas formulated by several theorists who have contributed to the understanding, adaptation, and application of the master-signifier to the analysis of political discourse and ideology (see Bracher, 1994; Laclau, 2004; Laclau&Mouffe, 1985;Rieger, 2001; Yanay, 2013; Žižek, 1996). Finally, by discussing these features critically and linking them to present-day Israel, the following pages also serve as a call for a necessary vigilant intellectual awareness of systems of violence proliferation, social domination, and other dark forces that lurk beneath the seemingly appealing concept of cultural reverence.
Moral purity.Cultural reverence's first and most primal feature,moral purity, refers to a decisive, sweeping, unadulterated, and even sacrosanct moral valuableness devoid of complexity. This definition corresponds to the idealization of the child's creativity among unconference participants or the emphasis on joy in such events. It derives from the most basic analytical constituent through which I have addressed the concept of positiveness: its fragmentation (Derrida's différance). Moral purity demands, by its very definition, an a priori differentiation of the concept from what it means, a fragmentation into a multiplicity of meanings, and a selective sampling of those meanings as opposed to those that weren't sampled. This binary opposition lies at the core of the definitions of negative and malevolent creativity;the positive needs to be separated from the repugnant negative or totally disconnected in order to be identified as creativity at all. As the opposite or negation of supposedly self-evident creativity, the negative, malevolent renditions of creativity signify the normativity of the positive. This was manifested very clearly not only in the widespread definitions of creativity, both in theory and in my informants'words, but also in the structural subjugation and peripherality of the backstage critiques, mentioned in Chapter 4 with regard to the resplendence of creativity's positiveness that lights up Chapter 3's frontstage. I am referring here to the inability of the backstage to replace, oppose, or merge with the frontstage:its hidden absence. The candid critique, expressed privately by several informants who practice and rate creativity highly in all its forms, theoretically concurs with post-colonial assertions that hybridity had always been the actual natural state (see Canclini, 1995). However, purity as an artificial fabrication is particularly powerful, since the culturally revered, encompassing all root metaphors by which it is glorified, possesses the capacity to suppress its own critique. Its power answers the demand of those who treat it with reverence to remain pure and deny the thanatic, to which it also corresponds by being the master-signifier. This has inspired my own reformulation of
184 negative creativity, which denounces the disconnection of the pure from the impure and points out the potential danger of the admiration of creativity. Though a quasi-hermetic set of binary oppositions mainlycharacterized the findings, I also propose a subtler approach. In his seminal work,Homo Hierarchicus (1966), Dumont described the Indian caste system as bound in a structural whole to the concepts of pure and impure as predominant ideological facets. The hierarchy articulated by Dumont may be immobile, but the social groups distinguished in his work are deeply interdependent: lower castes strive to emulate the higher castes' norms of conduct, while the latter go as far as seeking, in some cases, the geographic proximity of the untouchables in order to consolidate their ontological discernment. Although Dumont's work is of a highly structuralist bent, I interpret some of his empirical findings as prefiguring a far more dynamic philosophy. Yanay (2013), in her analysis of hatred, highlighted the interplay between love and hate, which can, for my purposes, be considered as analogous to purity (love) or impurity (hate). Yanay showed hate as a psychic structure that paradoxically entails a hidden discourse and an assertion of love and intimacy toward the object of hate as part of the subject's emotional state. Looking at Dumont's findings through Yanay's theoretical lens, a confounded coaction along a continuum between purity and its supposed opposite can be seen: saying "this is impure" ("this is morally wrong") can also mean "this is/could be pure" ("this can be morally redeemed/this is correct after all"); likewise, saying "this is pure" ("this is morally correct") can also mean "this is/could be impure" ("this is not enough/ this could go awry"). According to Rieger (2001), Lacan's master-signifier is not only a status of an end unto itself, but it is also in a position to "put to work the language of tradition" (p 140) in order to reshape the other as a potential or actual object of desire. In other words, the culturally revered, by virtue of its fragmented purity and intangible character and its concurrent fear of the impure, desires to redeem, harness, or even exploit impurity. In the more rigid and puritanical model to which most of my informants declared some sort of adherence, the divine creation, the creative technology for the betterment of mankind and for survival, deservesto be attached to the concept of creativity rather than to devilish wiles, military weaponry, stratagems, ruthless cunning, and fraudulence. Following Lacan and Yanay, however despicable and disavowed these wiles may be, they too are objects of desire that can be put to "good" use. In the national Jewish-Israeli cultural context, the controversial cliché of Jewish ruse can be domesticated, husbanded, and harnessed as Israeli business acumen in the unforgiving field of creative technologies or as a constituent of the fighter-spy persona. This was acknowledged by some of my informants, although not without reservations. For example, Eytan, the inventor quoted in Chapter 4, talked about his discomfort with survivalist Jewish lore that relates to deception and trickery;many others (such as Max), however, acknowledged Jewish ruse as the cultural precursor of today's Israeli creative
185 elitism. In this culturally endogenous context, the moral rehabilitation is palingenetic – it belongs to a movement of renaissance. In relation to the culturally exogenous, the feeling of intimacy toward the other's impurity and its subsequent redemption may take the form of an alleged "benevolence." For instance, military weaponry intended to inflict harm or surveillance methods intended to facilitate domination can be enhanced by technological means. A prime example would be the IDF practice of "targeted assassinations" (extra-judicial executions). By focusing solely on harming "the target" and the supposed avoidance of civilian casualties, killing is legitimized (Gordon, 2004). Another example, mentioned in Chapter 1, is the tactic of "walking through walls" adopted by the IDF during the second intifada. Regarded as inoffensive by not being immediately lethal, its results were still disastrous for the lives of the Palestinians unfortunate enough to be subjected to the practice. An additional striking example, this time within political discourse, was provided by an interview Israeli defense minister Avigdor Lieberman's 2016 gave to Al- Quds newspaper. In this interview, Lieberman proposed turning the Gaza Strip into a "Middle-Eastern Singapore," if only Hamas would relinquish its military stance. At the same time, Lieberman insisted that any future conflict with Hamas would be "the last"(Khoury, 2016).With his dichotomous and patronizing approach, Lieberman referred to both Gaza's creative redemption (relying on Israel's "start-up nation" status) and its potential creative destruction (Israel's military superiority). He also reiterated the elitism-paranoia nexus as the surface beneath which lies the pure-impure discursive relation. The paranoia of war and its concomitant need for an immediate annihilation of the enemy to prevent the subject's own future annihilation areenmeshed with a proposition for a reconciliation that is nevertheless rooted in elitist disdain for a largely incapable other. The Palestinians' liberation is therefore, in his terms, tied to continued domination. Despite these examples, ethnocratic and colonial violence toward Palestinians is absent from both the frontstage (publicly displayed creativity) and the backstage (especially the critique), a state of affairs that necessitates an explanation. As exemplified above, the dialectical albeit unilateral function of creative purity and impurity corresponds to the greater geopolitical equation of international and intra- national conflict and the political discourse within which the field exists.Creative purity and impurity are, for the most part, highly publicized and part of the public sphere, and the dialectics of redemption are ontologically valid,in other words, they are ostensibly real. Therefore, I do not argue that redeeming impurities lie in some inaccessible political, collective, or personal unconscious;rather,I see my informants' unwillingness to engage with political controversy when discussing creativity as implicit acknowledgement or an epistemic stance that creativity should be protected from difficulty. This protection is fundamental and informs the other themes discussed below.
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Therefore, this absence is attributable to a simpler, non-threatening, and largely more accessible model that opposes normative to malevolent and negative creativity.Invoking polemics in the Jewish-Israeli national context, the arena of reverence, would be, according to Douglas' (1966) framework, a "matter out of place," in other words, an impurity. In the backstage, the positiveness of cultural themes such as childlikeness or miraculousness can dichotomize and push away critique that contests this dichotomy. This is one form of shadowy creativity, the simpler one. The dark power of creativity's cultural reverence is doubly powerful it acknowledges that the oppression is real but also has the capacity to subdue that acknowledgement into discursive silence. The impurities of Israeli colonialism can be acknowledged, as they may be redeemed or "sweetened" and creativity as a revered concept may be safeguarded. Thematic hierarchy.The second characteristic of cultural reverence is its innate thematic hierarchy. This term refers to the unequal distribution of importance, moral valence, and what may be termed "discursive propulsion" (that is, the themes by which the concept becomes both known and worthy) of the signifiers such as innovation (in the case of products) or wiliness (in the case of process) that are associated with the object of cultural reverence. Thematic hierarchy derives from moral purity, as the primary hierarchy is the supremacy of good over evil. It is also reasonable to postulate that its primal nature informs a broad presence across many manifestations of cultural reverence, giving them an additional allure of purity and righteousness that both rings true and is politically usable. Asad (2003), for example,argued that the religious connotations of Manichean dichotomies may be understood in apparently secular contexts such as the Bush (and, more recently, Trump) administration's simplistic and strict distinction between "good guys" and "bad guys" in the so-called "war on terror".My argument, however, is more complex. I contend that thematic hierarchy does not mean only an arrangement of signifiers and themes as inferior or superior to each other. It is, rather, a situational matrix, in which all themes relating to the culturally revered are apparently equal in that they all refer to the master-signifier but can be set against each other, construed as inferior or superior to each other or as different from each other (though not necessarily so), and co-opted. The multivocality of their positions occurs in accordance with the contextspecific needs of socio-politico-cultural agendas embedded in power relations. In this regard, I observe the master-signifier's overtly political integrative work with a disparate array of elements in accordance with the powerful and coercive structure and function of powerful doctrines. In the case of the cultural reverence of creativity in Israel, these doctrines are unified by the link that connects patriarchy to the mobilizing power of ethno-nationalism. In order to elaborateon this correlation between patriarchy and ethno- nationalism and their power to position different themes as inferior or superior to each other, I find it useful to refer to Kristeva's (1974) analysis of the difference between what
187 she called the semiotic and the symbolic. For Kristeva the semiotic is the pre-verbal, pre- Oedipal stage and refers to sensual, irrational, and intuitive qualitiesas well as to playfulness, uninhibited pleasure, play, and jouissance. Although native to both genders, it is considered typically feminine. Through socialization and language acquisition, the semiotic is subjugated to the symbolic,namely, the voice of patriarchy that represents order, consciousness, and rationality. The semiotic becomes relegated to dreams, poetry, myth, ritual, and the arts. In creativity, though my informants generally spoke of the two states as equally legitimate and admirable, in the forms of processes and products, a co- optation is easily identified. An indirect penchant for the symbolic over the semiotic can be clearly recognized as a preference of products over processes or, in the linear construction of creativity, as a process that ideally leads to a product within a modernist- capitalist cosmology. Unconferences, for example, are of a supposedly semiotic character but are legitimate only insofar as they involve participants with proven abilities in the realm of symbolic activity – that is, the production of marketable and preferably technological creativity in instrumental domains – or, more broadly, gifted in all that pertains to the monetization of creativity. This dialectical tension is therefore not resolved as a synthesis but as an ongoing and stable, patriarchically-informed co- optation of the frivolous feminine by the mature masculine. As with moral purity, here too a simpler form of discourse obscures a more complex set of relations, some of which concern Israel's guiding doctrine at present times, directed at the preservation of ethnic statehood. The premise of a Cartesian, naturalistic dualist movement that constructs creativity, as described above, becomes convincing and commonsensical, as the culturally revered master-signifier constantly obfuscates the discursive complexity that continuously undergirds it. I argue that this complexity comprises a situational positioning of signifiers of creativity, used to justify the nation-state's ethnic and patriarchic logic, according towhich they either gain or lose "points" (as legitimacy) or can be considered either symbolic or semiotic, according to context. I illustrate this idea via two examples. The first example may be termed the "sexual creativity" of the well-known LGBT community concentrated in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area. Widely acknowledged, even flaunted, as boosting the politically tolerant bastion of liberal secularismin which the high-tech industry thrives, this community's contribution accentuates Israel's self-perception as a westernized, progressive enclave amid the Middle-Eastern backwardness of intolerant neighboring Arab countries. The Israeli regime's tolerance in this particular field, overshadowing its other forms of intolerance (commonly referred to as "pinkwashing"), cements Israel’s alleged appurtenance to the open, rational, and progressive "masculine" Occident (symbolic) in contrast to the uneducated, closed, and unenlightened "feminine" Orient (semiotic). At the same time, this community can just as well be regarded as deviant and loathsome and is occasionally
188 treated as a kind of "repugnant other": not only does it undermine the basic religious doctrines that underpin Israel's traditional values, but it is deeply involved in the local scene of creative arts, which often produces subversive countercultural content denouncing the violation of human right and encompassing various post-colonial minorities. Paradoxically and perhaps ironically, right-wing Israeli political parties that time and again celebrate Israeli creativity, namely Israel's status as a "start-up nation," i.e., its symbolic aspect,are the same ones who vehemently decry the LGBT community's "sexual deviance" (the semiotic aspect), conveniently ignoring its contribution to the focus of their celebration. An additional example relates to the underestimation of Palestinian creativity. The aforementioned moral purity may refer not only to principles of Kantian ethics or some sort of homogenous saintliness but also to craftsmanship. In such cases, creative work done "properly" (i.e., symbolic) is morally virtuous and highlights the other's failed or lesser creativity (i.e., semiotic). In Israel, this interpretation of creativity plays an important (albeit quite casual and reflexive) role in the undervaluation of Palestinian work. However much Arab labor is exploited in Israel (due to the attractiveness of low- cost labor) and regardless of whether a job is actually done by Arabs, work done in a shoddy fashion is pejoratively referred to as "avoda aravit" (literally, "Arab work"). Of course, this locates a finished technological product (pure) far above the continuous creative daily process of the "making-do" required for coping with the conditions of poverty or the various constraints of a military-occupying regime (impure). Nonetheless, that very same "shoddy" creativity, when exhibited by Jews, is often viewed positively and highlighted as a positive (maybe even endearing) characteristic of coping strategies, ascribed to the multi-millennial history of Jewish persecution and the mythology of the Zionist pioneers and Israel's early years. It even bears a resemblance to the concept of "shiftzur," military jargon for the amelioration of military equipment by way of technical improvisation. Despite the similarities, this type of creative material improvisation has been showcased and applauded by informants in, for example,long hackathons stretching over several days that involve bricolage, technical problem- solving, and low-tech proficiency. However, these were celebrated as a Jewish-Israeli characteristic and never associated with Palestinians. Ultimately, all signs that point to creativity are relative to one another. Play, for example, may be seen as superior to work or even opposed to it in certain celebrated instances of heightened creativity, but it can also be construed as having largely negligible value compared to pure or commercial science. The legitimacy of this interplay is, however, not contested, because it befits the basic co-optation of the semiotic by the symbolic and is thematically unthreatening and therefore publicly accepted. I referred to Palestinians and the LGBT community precisely because they did not constitute a significant share of my fieldwork. They are absent; any serious
189 discussion of these would raise the subject of human rights, which, as I have argued, is deemed thematically disruptive and unsuitable for either the frontstage or the backstage. This is because both stages are informed by basically conservative doctrines: the elitism-paranoia nexus (a "forever threatened position") on the one hand, and this patriarchy/ethno-nationalism on the other. By referring to the LGBT community and shoddy work among Jews and Palestinians, I demonstrate the all-encompassing capacity of the master-signifier to enlist references to creativity that can be differentially situated and evaluated according to the contextualizing power of Israel's basic ethno-nationalist agenda. When conjured up, a repressed discourse emerges; conversely, the power of cultural reverence and the political impetus by which it is guided imposes a shifting hierarchy that can extract from controversial subjects only their benefits, as any of those may actually bedeemed an asset or countered as repugnant depending on the context in which they are presented. The submissive, sycophantic political ideology that propels the culturally revered idiom enables the latter to manipulate even themes which are not directly evoked and to pit them against each other. It is here that moral purity differs from thematic hierarchy most clearly: while the former seems more committed to a universal humanistic sensitivity, the latter reveals the culture-specific political and ideological apparatus that informs the thematic balance of powers according to which the reverence is formed and maintained. In Israel this apparatus melds the power of patriarchy as a reference to "masculinity" and profitable instrumental domains of creativity with the (eminently patriarchic) ethno-national logic that pervades the political and public sphere.
Compulsory pleasure.The third characteristic of cultural reverence is compulsory pleasure. By deploying Rich’s (1980) feminist critique of compulsory heterosexuality, compulsory pleasure not only implies a subjugation of pleasure to patriarchal libidinal interest, thus in keeping with thematic hierarchy,but also informs the individual's emotive phenomenology. While engaging either in the production or the consumption of the culturally revered, experiencing pleasure becomes both a personal and social obligation. Like thematic hierarchy, compulsory pleasure also derives from moral purity. However, while the latter refers to abstract modes of thought, linguistic expressions, and discourses, the former denotes personal affect, the display of emotions, and modes of behavior that relate to the subject of cultural reverence. The master- signifier is compelling, as it is the signifier from whicheverything radiates.It encompasses cognitive and epistemological constructs as well as emotive states andconstitutes the final guarantee of meaning of creativity at the most primordial plane of human existence. In this case, creativity is both a "pushing" and a "pulling" force: it drives the private, innate human capacity for creativity and attracts peopleto whatever may be publicly evaluated as creative.As shown earlier, on the personal level, moments
190 of creativity are experienced as a "pushing" force whenever recounted as a kick or a rush and even communicated by sensuous and quasi-erotic imagery, especially when it comes to nocturnal creative work. This "pushing" force is also manifested in the bottom- up nature of unconferences in the sense that "the people" demand the managerial authorities to allow them the opportunity to express their creativity. The evidence for creativity as a "pulling" force can be found in the ethnographic descriptions of the euphoric evaluations of practices, processes, and especially products in unconferences, competitions, and exhibitions with varying degrees of intensity and, of course, in the excited media coverage of Israeli exploits as a "start-up nation." In short, the personal and social devoir to feel and express pleasure in creativity's presence is all but palpable;there is, in keeping with Rich's (1980) concept of "hetero-normativity," a "delectatio-normativity" of the culturally revered. Naturally, the systems of social control and moral order that promote cultural reverence also work in the opposite direction,in other words, toward denial and disempowerment of its critique. This has been discussed in relation to the hidden absence of the backstage critique, but a more critical look demands a closer examination of creativity as cultural reverence through two features: the power to colonize and the power to decontextualize. Creativity is perceived as originating from the human mind as a joyful emotive state triggered by an intellectual experience or a spiritual epiphany enjoyed as the pleasurable acquisition of an object of desire. As it gains national recognition and acceptance, it moves from the individual to increasingly more social realms. In the Israeli cultural system, creativity is a personal resource, but it is a personal attribute encouraged to be used primarily for entrepreneurial ends (understood in the capitalist imaginary as social or even virtually philanthropic) and, insofar as it is successful, it turns into a subject of intense fascination at a national level. Creativity in this sense becomes a national virtue which may be appropriated by the nation and thus become a powerful factor in Israel’s colonial politics. This "push-pull" colonizing relationship between personal creativity and the nation(al creativity) is cyclical. Rosaldo (1989) observed that "even our so-called realms of pure freedom, our fantasy and 'innermost thoughts' are produced and limited by our local culture" (p. 25). Therefore, the admiration of successful creativity is redirected at the subject's ability to generate creativity by the collective to which theybelong and contribute and, by extension, to their in-group. Cultural reverence enables a collective celebration. According to Marshall's (2002) ritual terms of "behavior, belonging, and belief," a creative behavior engenders a belief in creativity as a plausible sovereign entity informing all spheres of life and a sense of belonging to a creative collective that should embrace this belief and its behavior, namely,the focus of ritual attention. Since pride and vanity are pleasant emotions (Thoits, 1989), such collective narcissism grows enamored with and dedicated to its own capacity to generate the subject of fascination, pleasure, desire, and reverence. In other
191 words, in a political context dominated by cultural reverence, the possibility of a political spaceand of a balance of powers between civil society and the state (Grinberg, 2011) is more constrained. A space of mediation, negotiation, and representation in the public sphere's mainstream cannot open up. In such a space, creativity's reverence would,ideally, be contested, and individuals whose innate emotive pleasure inspired the culturally revered would not be discursively forced into "fractality." Here I employ the mathematician Mandelbrot's (1982) term "fractals" (increasingly used in cultural studies) to refer to individuals as potentially ideal, self-similar geometrical patterns of the collective who are directed to aspire to emulate a certain preferred type of creativity. An example of this can be found in fashionable discourses in Israel, according to which high-tech creativity, or at least creativity in some other form, can and should be practiced by everyone. Most recently, in the name of diversity and the benefit of accessing untapped creative potential, Israeli officials have endorsed the inclusion of ultra-orthodox Jews (mostly women) (Bsoul, 2016) and Israeli-Palestinians (mostly men) in the high-tech sector98alongside Mizrahi Jews in Israel's periphery who have long been the subjects of educational programs promoting interest in high-tech. Groups who were not part of the ethnic founding contract and its apportioned privileged niches are now invited to partake more substantially in Israel's economy and to enjoy its benefits –not all groups, of course, and not the general economy but rather the most coveted sector, where a select, deserving few might make it. This hints at the meritocracy underwriting this invitation which is discussed below. In this sense and according to Hume's "is-ought problem" (and in contrastto Hume's own criticism of it), in Jewish-Israeli national creativity, the statement of fact, i.e., that Israel is a creative superpower, slides into the imperative to be creative (as part of being properly Israeli). As such, it alludes to a practice of economic inclusion and hints at the possibility of political inclusion, at least for Palestinian-Israelis, and relates to Israel's ethnic logic of capital as an ethnocracy. This "invitation" is rooted in pleasure. The high-tech sector holds the double promise of Fromm's concept of freedom (Funk, 2000), self-evident to my informants(and thus rarely discussed or contested but eminently present in creativity events). This promise comprises, on the one hand, negative freedom, namely,the absence of coercion and constraint and, on the other hand, positive freedom, namely,the ability to pursue one's dreams and ambitions and be one's own master. The former refers to the practice of creativity itself, as creativity is, of course, coterminous with freedom;the latter obviously refers to self-actualization but also denotes the possibility of deliverance from being trapped in a politico-economic uncreative underclass. The pleasure of economic liberation, potential sociopolitical equality, and professional self-fulfillment through an ethos of entrepreneurial self-reliance is
98Tsofen is an Arab-Jewish organization which promotes the integration of Palestinian-Israelis into the high-tech sector: See http://tsofen.org/en/.
192 undermined by a concomitant neoliberal meritocratic discourse. To return to the concept of fractals (in other words, the same shape on different scales),the idea of self-similarity contains a tacit acknowledgement that while everyone can and should partake in high- tech and creativity (the same shape), not everyone can do so with equal success (different scale). The meritocratic ideology celebrates the individual's alleged linear ability to believe, aspire, and achieve, thusbearing a close resemblance to both freedom and creativity. However, critics of meritocracy (see Allen, 2011; Littler, 2013) denounce this would-be virtuous ideal as a hopeful fantasy or indeed a disingenuous falsehood. According to them, meritocracy does little to actually empower but serves as an ideological myth to obscure and, indeed, justify social and economic iniquities. While typically highlighting privileged access to better education and/or training,the myth insists that merit will lead to growth and that growth can only be attributed to merit; failure can, consequently, only be attributed to a lack of merit (and is thus attributed, ever more explicitly). In more critical terms, following Bhabha's (1995) development on Lacan's conception of mimicry, Israeli post-colonial subjects are presented with a metaphorically "techno-anglophile" proposition. It is inspired by the enjoyment characterizing the emotive core of the individual's innate capacity for creativity and even appeals to the jingoistic sensibilities of Jews on both sides of these power relations. Here, however,Palestinians-Israelis are all the more excluded, as they cannot enter the most revered field of technological creativity formation–the army intelligence units – and thus the enjoyment and the techno-anglophile proposition are unkept promises. These Israeli post-colonial social categories are subjects of the colonial desire (or pleasure) to "civilize," either by inclusion in the case of fellow Jews or by patronizing beneficence in the case of Palestinians. Both ultimately emerge as imperfect and inappropriate mimics of the colonizer: they remain the colonizer's "failed" other and, as such, correspond both with moral purity's attempt at redemption and the thematic hierarchy vis-a-vis the colonized (and the internal hierarchy between the "inferior Jews" and the Palestinians). High-tech people, largely perceived as the descendants of the Jewish-Ashkenazi elite, may therefore rely on a mechanism still committed to conserving social hierarchy,while shrugging off allegations of structural discrimination or even immorality. By discrimination, I am referring to their ability to interpret themselves, as mentioned in Chapter 3, as struggling creators and heroic winners and losers in a neoliberal economy while masking a privileged background;by immorality, I am referringto the direct link between the high-tech industry and the military-industrial complex. Previous military training and participation in military actions carries over, often directly and explicitly, into prestigious and privileged niches in the civilian labor market, which are hailed as benefiting all of Israeli society due to their immense
193 contribution to financial stability (while overlooking the uneven distribution of privileges and gains). From a moral point of view, this capitalization on military experience insinuates some amelioration or even redemption of the army's questionable morality, even if another form of immorality, the meritocratic and neoliberal one, comes out unaffected. Such redemption can be interpreted as the colonization, by pleasure, of military insidious activities by high-tech's glamorous charisma. Considering Israel's military actions, colonization is not relegated merely to the circular consolidation of reverence toward a given cultural idiom but may be interpreted literally. Creativity partakes directly in Israel's colonial policies. When coupled with pleasure, it may be blunt, such as in Lieberman's aforementioned offer/threat to the Palestinians,in which having control over the other's pleasure is, according to Yanay (2013), the most fundamental fantasy of political power. It may also be of a more obscure and obscuring character, which I refer to as decontextualization.In the dominion of pleasure, pain amounts to moral deviance. The prescribed enjoyment of consumption and the production of culturally revered creativity, which is the assumed norm, compels the rejection of suffering, both of one’s self and of the other. This rejection, which is similar to the rejection of negative creative creativity in the construction of normative creativity, involves the separation of pain from its empirical and political context through the titillating pleasure that creativity elicits within the self. To illustrate this, I present three personal vignettes that occurred while I was conducting or preparing for fieldwork in which I was made aware of such compulsion to feel pleasure and deny pain in the context of Israel's ethno-national moral failures. The first took placein 2016, when my father introduced me to the Israeli TV series Fauda, which is about a unit of mista’arvim, an IDF counter-terrorism undercover unit which operates through assimilating into the Palestinian population. Reminiscing about his good (and bad) old days as a reserve soldier during the first intifida, he wanted to show me what he called the "brilliance and creativity of the unit." At the beginning of the first episode, a group of "Palestinians," seemingly wounded and crying for help, enter a mosque. When the prime target and others rush over to help, the wounded reveal themselves as IDF soldiers of the unit and with surgical cinematic precision, swiftly grab the suspect and flee without firing a single shot. My father thought I would be impressed at the creativity displayed by the unit's ruse. I was actually more worried about my father's ability to mistake the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for entertainment and a gloomy-looking urban setting located not far from his homefora legitimate playground for military cunning. The second vignette involved a student in a course I was teaching about creativity in 2013, who, inspired by a newspaper article he had read, asked for permission to write his paper on so-called progressive methods of "non-touch torture" that were being developed. These methods were going beyond mere direct or indirect physical or
194 emotional tortureand aimed at obtaining from detainees concealed information without harming the body or even engaging in questioning via advanced technology which produced mind-reading-like results. For my student, this technology (some of it developed in Israel), enabling interrogators to extract information from the mind without hurting the body, represented huge progress in the legitimization and amelioration of otherwise illegitimate methods of torture. Whereas I had not, due to our differing political orientations, responded to my father, in this case, while I did authorize my student's topic, since it related to both creativity and the anthropology of the body, I stipulateda critical approach. Iencouraged him to consider, for example, the denial of civil liberties to those subjected to this supposedly inoffensive form of questioning and to be reflective about his own enthusiasm forthe technology. The last vignette occurred in 2010. James Cameron's 2009 film Avatar was at the height of its popularity, andat a protest against the construction of the separation wall in the village of Bil'in,Palestinians dressed up as the movie's fictional Na'vi alien tribe (see also Holtmeier, 2013). In the film, the Na'vi are brutally colonized by paramilitary personnel employed by corporatist profit-driven humans. Eventually, aided by the conscientious protagonist, a soldier who "goes native," they fend off the oppressive colonizer. The allegory was obvious, but it left me with a dilemma: while I was highly sympathetic toward the Palestinians' rights on (and to) their land, from which they were being expelled,I was worried that the ingenious idea of drawing attention to the problem by referring to Cameron's blockbusterreduced the brutal reality of the clashes in Bil'in to little more than a trite, inoffensive, virtual, and certainly inefficient anecdote in terms of resistance. In this case particularly, I was forced to conclude that creativity has the potential to further disempower the powerless, an instance rendered more pathetic by the fact that this powerless group sought empowerment in creativity. These vignettes illustrate instances that can be termed "creative decontextualization." In all of the cases (except perhaps the second example, which is more a feature of Pax-Americana colonial practice but sure to be included in Israel's future military repertoire), denial of the harsh reality of Israel's occupation was induced through a medium that conveyed pleasure in several ways. In the first vignette, it was a form of collective guile; in the second, it was moral redemption; and in the third, it was a non-threatening reformulation of an oppressive situation in terms of fantastical fiction. In all cases, the conveying of the message via the media of pleasurable entertainment (the journalistic article in the second case could be seen as jingoistic infotainment) accentuated the message. Decontextualization is closely associated with the theoretical examination of compulsory pleasure's colonizing power. It asserts the mastery of the colonizer over the culturally revered in terms of the ability to manipulate it in its favor. I do not claim that the colonizer is in sole control of pleasure or that italways masters it better;there is room for resistance. However, pleasure naturally soothes, and people's
195 obvious preference for it can obscure pain. Therefore, pleasure, certainly when coupled with creativity, is a more natural ally of complacence and the denial of conflict and injustice and may even be counterproductive in the hands of the colonized. To summarize, I am not simply arguing that cultural reverence promotes a uniform emotional structure with regard to itself as a master-signifier. Rather, I claim that compulsory pleasure informs the emotional dimension of cultural reverence, mediating between the individual's psyche and the sociocultural surroundings. Taking pleasure in the culturally revered is inevitable, whether because of social pressure, personal internalization of norms, or "control of consciousness" as Rich (1980) put it. The colonizing power of compulsory pleasure renders irreverence impossible, inhibiting and masking any individual's inability or unwillingness to invest its identity in the master-signifier. It also explains the absence from the frontstage of any pain that does not end in pleasure: entrepreneurial self-reliance is always celebrated and meritocracy's tautological flaws, which can explain and legitimize both success and failure, accepted. The decontextualizing power of compulsory pleasure inhibits the opposing emotional spectrum across a variety of themes. It ensures the moral purity of the culturally revered by accentuating the hierarchical superiority of pleasure over pain, which could, in principle, contest it; or,to put it morepoetically,it invites our attention to islands of delight, even if they are stranded in a sea of sorrow. Cultural mashups. Relying on the tacit embrace of normlessness and cultural chaos in postmodernist and post-structuralist theory, the fourth characteristic of cultural reverence is what I call cultural mashups. I refer here to the idea that within a cultural system that shares a reverence toward a single master-signifier as an integrating entity of disparate cultural components, all signs may be considered either closely or remotely connected to each other, constituents of a single historic and cultural kinship chart. The master-signifier knits together different constituencies, even from opposite political agendas or unrelated thematic realms, and they therefore readily engage in a cultural fusion with each other. In Chapters 3 and 4 I elaborated on these cultural mashups. I explained the formation of both unlikely and more likely linkages including: the pairing of symbols of Jewishness and technology to signify the Jewish genius as a parole mythique; the perception of Jewish persecution as an historical antecedent to geopolitical frailty (overlooking the role of ongoing colonization in the present-day Israeli-Arab acrimony); and the problematic connection between play and success (according to the informants in Chapter 4's backstage critique). The master-signifier lifts constituents from a shared historiography that refers to creativity and draws upon its own ability to mediate or, to put it more critically, create or invent some sort of connection:for example, the historical bricolage that links various Israeli inventions that weren’t actually connected historically, such as implying that the cherry tomato and the USB flash driveboth stem from a unified capacity. This is perhaps the most culture-
196 specific feature of all; whereas the abstract capacity to create mashups may be universal, some of the results are undeniably culturally idiosyncratic. I therefore highlight the construction of plausibility as an imperative in the creation of cultural mashups, legitimizing various connections that might have been dismissed as unreasonable, problematic, or downright absurd:for example, the attempt to "nationalize" the achievements of American-Jewish scientists that is vehemently denounced by Eyal in Chapter 4. The prime discursive strategy in this legitimization is, of course, the largely ideological power structures from which the aforementioned kinship chart derives, but others may also be identified. One of them is pleasure. Pleasure has been seen as connected to the willingness to consider somewhat absurd or even irrational claims. Several studies – some published in accessible but well-grounded pop psychology format (and an integral part of the available literature on creativity in this domain), namely, the works of world-renowned Israeli researchers Daniel Kahenman (Nobel laureate) and Dan Ariely –have asserted that pleasure is tied to irrationality. Both researchers have claimed that pleasure and irrationality are interconnected, either in the sense that irrationality is pleasurable (as in production) or in the sense that pleasure facilitates the acceptance of irrational thought (as in consumption) (Ariely, 2012, 2015;Kahenman, 2011). I therefore acknowledge compulsory pleasure as a social and personal catalyst, perhaps even a necessary one, facilitating both the production and the consumption of cultural mashups, especially if they are somewhat controversial. Such a claim is evident in unconferences, which provide a pleasurably protective climate facilitating the participants' willingness to engage with "serious silliness," itself a mashup of childlikeness and adulthood. From the theoretical viewpoint of the master-signifier, one could point to a "master-mashup" that, by relying on more primal themes, informs more specific ones. In Israel, this master-mashup is the tribal nexus of elitism and paranoia. Its thematic and structural outline may be easily detected in two more particular mashups, which I submitted to different theoretical approaches more relevant to Jewish-Israeli national culture in Chapter 4: the pairing of Orthodox Jewry and secular technology to signify the mythology of the Jewish mind and the combination of Jewish cunning, militarism, and secrecy to fashion the persona of the fighter-spy, who is both superhuman and subhuman in terms of strength. Both mashups allude to the elitist mind contrasted with the frail and paranoid body of the Jew andto the elitism and the paranoia of the militarily strong and technologically superior yet geopolitically threatened Muskeljuden. Both are politically useful in all that concerns the Jewish-Israeli national claim of being an identifiable demos (this demos, based on the Zionist idiom "ingathering of the exiles," yet another mashup, includes the supposedly '"inferior" (Mizrahi) Jews but excludes the Arabs) which is more "culturally worthy" of the contested territory than the unworthy "other" and more capable of imposing the formers' will on the multi-ethnic contested
197 territory. Both are also related to the mashup of time, a concept which some anthropologists have referred to as a nonlinear and highly malleable construct (Fabian, 1983; Gell, 1992b). Following this observation, an inclusive culturally revered master- signifier can have flexible beginnings and ends; creativity can fuse together a revolutionary, futuristic, techno-utopia with a conservative present and a reactionary nostalgia for a theocratic-inspired past in a single politico-temporal frame. Of all cultural reverence's characteristics, cultural mashups is the most subservient to Israeli ethnocratic tendencies. This corresponds to the master-signifier's use as "the bottom line," the answer to the whys and hows (Bracher,1994). The cultural reverence of creativity answers such questions in relation to the formation and ongoing maintenance of a settler society:why it should be done (legitimizing the cultural worthiness of the demos on the land) and how it can be achieved (through creative elitism and strength). It is therefore interesting and paradoxical to note that creativity as an increasingly globalized and vital cultural idiom is almost synonymous with change and revolutionary political tendencies;however, its status as a culturally revered idiom in Israel, alongside change, is also compatible with conservative and even reactionary political leanings.
Another form of cultural mashup, this time of a darker character, corresponds to a "reverse engineering" of comprehending reality from a post-structural standpoint, in other words,a possible abuse of the intellectual capacity to identify and "undo" the conventions that impose meaning on reality in order to think unconventionally for negative and immoral purposes. In the aforementioned case of “walking through walls," the author of the original article, Eyal Weizman (2006), caused a minor scandal in academic settings, when he revealed, in the article, that the idea had come from a tendency among some intellectual officers to stimulate new approaches to military activity through complex and inspiring post-structuralist writings, most notably by Deleuze and Guattari. If the urban battlefield of the occupation is to be treated like a text or language, then it is similarly susceptible to interpretation and misinterpretation and therefore an untrustworthy vehicle of truth. The intellectual enjoyment derived from drawing out the threads from which reality is woven in order to reconstitute it and conjure up an efficient, creative stratagem (which, its authors insist, is designed to minimize Palestinian casualties) fits the definition of negative, if not malevolent, creativity. The mind-sharpening sophistication of libertarian teachings, which, by definition, encourage a critical and deconstructionist perception of "reality," is redirected toward ongoing oppression. This showcases both the positive use of the mashup – understanding the potentially oppressive nature of cultural mashups promoted and legitimized by cultural reverence – as well as the critical awareness of its negative applicability.
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Confidence.The fifth and final characteristic of cultural reverence is confidence. By this I mean the emotional and intellectual trust in the culturally revered idiom by the individual and the collective, the belief that the latter bestows the protection of higher powers upon the former. Confidence therefore corresponds to early psychological and anthropological theoretical formulations (primarily by Freud and Malinowski respectively) that emphasized people's essential need for security – physical, emotional, and epistemological – against the persistence of thwarted instinct. Confidence is distinguished from the other four features of cultural reverence, as it is a confluence to which they all eventually lead. In creativity, as in other culturally revered idioms, moral purity promotes confidence as it instills a deep sense of satisfaction, a certainty that one walks a righteous path toward ongoing improvement, either through redemption or due to a perpetual anxiety that the "bar is set too low," or that a higher morality can, should, and will be achieved. Moral purity as it relates to confidence is a protective feature of the master- signifier, in the moral sense of the term, but it can also be an almost physical feature if experienced as a feeling of material safety resulting from technological accomplishment. Thematic hierarchy too consolidates a notion of confident supremacy either by emphasizing or downplaying creativity-related themes according to a context and is informed by an ideological apparatus intended to inspire confidence, even by partially evoking paranoia (thus increasing the need for confidence). Compulsory pleasure contributes to confidence via the natural association (which critical thinking would deny) between pleasure and safety on the one hand and pain and danger on the other. It further inhibits and obviates warning signs or contradictory evidence. The construal of pain as a precursor to an inevitable creative reward and the reward as endemic to creativity, which does not necessarily lead to pain, confounds the two categories but not equally: pain is expected to turn into pleasure, but the reverse is not true, and therefore both can be experienced by an unalarmed individual. Finally, cultural mashups contribute to confidence as they provide a plausible, convincing, and culture- specific set of causal relations to explain why the culturally revered idiom is to be trusted. Whether general (child/adult) or specific (powerless swindler/military Jew), cultural mashups lend confidence which reassures explanatory credence. In the context of Jewish-Israeli creativity, confidence corresponds to elitism and its shadowy creativity; the danger lies in overconfidence. In Chapter 1 and throughout the ethnographic chapters, I discussed at length Israel's elitism-paranoia/weakness- strength nexus – its self-perception as a feeble nation under constant siege. Israel's investment in technological advantage related to state security and its resulting creative by-products, alongside other achievements, are interpreted as a miraculous overcoming of would-be insurmountable obstacles, a wondrous defiance of nature and triumph over hostile environs, promoting a heightened sense of national safety. In this work, I take it
199 as axiomatic that natural laws cannot be overcome and that claims to such abilities are, by definition, distortions or fabrications. Therefore, in the particular context of creativity's cultural reverence in Israel, wherein creativity is construedas imperative for survival (and survival as the central imperative), I argue that overconfidence potentially and tragically undermines Israel's chances of survival. A total investment of Israel's existence in a master-signifier, which represents an incommensurable totality that all of Israel's assurances of security supposedly designate, is a maladaptive behavior that bears a resemblance to some manic states. I don’t, of course, mean to claim that Israel as a whole is in a manic trance. However, two of the characteristics of a manic state as described by Leahyand Beck (1988), namely, the exaggeration of current and future resources and the overestimation of the ability to persevere and replicate,match the idea of defiance of nature. Such a nation will never, for example, feel a need for a peace process, even if it continues to perceive itself as forever existentially threatened by war. Any challenge is, by force, a triumph-to-be. Creativity represses fear by claiming omnipotence and omniscience, as it offers positive biases that may counter a more dour, if realistic, geopolitical perspective. Shalit (1994), referring to the 1967 euphoria as a precursor to the 1973 "wake-up call," argued that if reality is ignored, catastrophe may actually move closer precisely because the fear of it is repressed. I end the discussion about confidence with a final personal vignette, reiterating the combination of secrecy and infinity that fashion creativity's status as an indefinite semiotic sign. In the summer of 2003, after responding to an ad published at my university, I accompanied a delegation of young French Jews who had come to Israel through the Birthright program.99 I recall a heated debate between two participants in the program that took place during one of the tours. They were discussing the different strategic and tactical modes that should be adopted in the face of the "persecution" that theywere suffering in their country of origin, an issue which frequently came up. I do not recall exactly what the female participant said, but the argument ended when the male participant victoriously quoted a knockout sentence that he claimed was carved on the wall of his local Jewish Community Center or synagogue: "Who is the strongest man? The man whose real strength no one knows." This statement, probably implying that the Jewish community's power derived somehow from an ambiguity about the extent of its strength,vagueness or lack of knowledge is not deemed disadvantageous. The lack of knowledge, when it becomes an object of fantasy and not a process of disclosure or discussion, can also be a reassuring fetish.The culturally revered idiom's nebulous nature as a master-signifier both full and devoid of meaning is just such a fetish.Creativity, when referring to secrecy and infinity in Chapter 4's omnipotent
99 According to the program's website, "Birthright Israel was born of a bold vision to make an educational trip to Israel an integral part of the life of every young Jew, in an effort to generate a profound transformation in contemporary Jewish culture and a connection between Israelis and their peers in the Diaspora." (Retrieved from http://taglitww.birthrightisrael.com/TaglitBirthrightIsraelStory/Pages/default.aspx)
200 guardianship, fulfills the promise of confidence and inspires trust, just as it relates to its own lack of clarity. My claim regarding the repressed discourse of Jewish-Israeli malicious and negative creativity was instructed or informed by the deconstructive approach. I became suspicious that my interlocutors saw creativity solely through the eyes of cultural reverence. Still, as I made clear in Chapter 1,by highlighting malicious and negative creativity I do not claim that I have uncovered the truth but rather postulated the presence of some sub-textual possible undercurrents. The term "a possible reading" is crucial here for my analysis, as possibility opens the text for its repressed themes against the hegemonic narratives related to creativity. Possibility is also rather creative;what is creativity if not the unorthodox understanding of reality? At the same time,my readings of repression entail further creative possibilities because, since it is theoretically guided by deconstruction, it claims its authority precisely by being subjected to further interpretations and deconstructive possibilities.
Final Remarks This concluding chapter was somewhat inspired by Audre Lorde's famous aphorism in 1979 that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house"; so too a dominant discourse will not allow for its own deconstruction. The wide thematic range that appeared in the ethnographic field of inquiry required, however, an additional layer of critique, before it yielded the repressed themes that I identified as relatingto Israel's ethnocratic ambitions, the conservative adaptation of a concept that evokes openness in such a way that it preserves internal hierarchical structures. I introduced the concept of cultural reverence, principally through the framework of Lacan's master-signifier, to relate to the power of creativity as a cultural and political concept for three purposes: first, as a theoretical tool to discover discourses and themes that may have been sidelined or manipulated into a repressed state; second, as an abstract concept that may be redirected to other cultural idioms of reverence; and third, as an additional set of critical reflections on the issues emerging from my fieldwork. Cultural reverence is an advantageous concept, as it enables both the addressing and transcending of the empirical findings in order to "zoom out" of particular themes that have been raised and subsequently"zoom in" on those that haven't. This theoretical maneuver is somewhat paradoxical but nonetheless beneficial. The partial exclusion of the focus in the ethnographic chapters enabled the inclusion of themes of a culture-specific controversial nature alongside the "ethnographically legitimate" ones. To put it bluntly, I am referring to the possibility of the democratic state authority abusing negative and malevolent creativity – physical, economic, and cultural – in its interactions with a variety of post-
201 colonial subjects, both Jews and Arabs. I believe that presenting these themes enriches and deepens the critical understanding of the field of creativity and offers a glimpse into future paths of exploration, as further research is undoubtedly needed. All the while, the examination of controversial topics remains true to what I witnessed during fieldwork and acknowledges that the absence of those repressed themes, is indeed, a crucial part of my findings. Cultural reverence is, undoubtedly, anything but exclusive to the study of creativity as it relates to Jewish-Israeli nationalism. Removed from this specific cultural context, moral purity, thematic hierarchy, compulsory pleasure, cultural mashups, and confidence, as the features of cultural reverence, all remain solid constructs that can be redirected for other purposes inside and outside of Israel or the realm of creativity. However, as all five were presented in this particular context, their presentation should end with a critical and deconstructive deployment –a call for change specific to the topic of creativity in Israel and rooted firmly in my conviction that academic knowledge ought to partake in the shaping of popular discourse. A deconstructive reading of moral purity calls for a concept of creativity that is naturally morally impure, whole rather than fragmented, and not exempt from moral questions that would be expected in any debate. Such a concept of creativity is incapable of any kind of "moral redemption" and problematizes the subsequent creation of metaphors, ideologies, and images of easy positiveness relating to Israel. A deconstructive reading of thematic hierarchy reinstates a perception of equality between different types of creativity. Chief among these is the inequality between the subversiveness of the arts (endorsed and protected by the political left) and the profit-driven docility of creative technologies (endorsed and protected by the political right and, to a smaller extent, the political left). A deconstructive reading of compulsory pleasure transcends the simple pleasure that creativity induces and the basic human affinity toward it and recognizes the pain it induces in two ways: firstly, by acknowledging pain in general (that is not rewarded by pleasure) as an intrinsic part of the concept of creativity, and second, by acknowledging the other's existence and its suffering as a result of Israel’s manipulation of creativity for purposes of surveillance and control of the Palestinian population, for example. A deconstructive reading of cultural mashups calls for an attentive scrutiny of facile pairings and combinations of cultural items that "make sense"or "ring true" and especially of the strategies that construe them as such. This is needed all the more as the naturalization of mythologies of creativity in the popular imagination masks the ideological apparatus that informs them and facilitates the absurd transformation of the notion of "implausible" to "plausible." A deconstructive reading of confidence foregoes the elitism-paranoia nexus, any ethnocratic ambitions, and,in particular, the pleasant and appealing perception of Israel's
202 indestructibility and superiority by creative means. Creativity should not be used to legitimize struggle or pathologized interactions and should instead clear the way for a cooperative and non-belligerent process of ensuring safety and equality, a process guaranteed to be most creative.
*** Stanley Kubrick's undisputed masterpiece,2001: A Space Odyssey, begins at the dawn of mankind with a group of hominids, who, in a flash of insight, realize how a bone may be used as a weapon to fight off a rival tribe. As the bone is thrown in the air, it turns into a rotating space station millions of years later to the sounds of Johann Strauss' The Blue Danube, creating one of the most memorable milestones in cinematic history. Creativity was, is, and always will be part of our (as homo sapiens) technological, cultural, and artistic ingenuity. From the beginning of civilization, from the first primitive inventions of tools to the various space endeavors, humans have relied on creative developments to better and secure human life. However, as insinuated in the transformation of a primitive weapon to space technology, this creativity was always enacted with both positive and negative intent or results, and the two cannot be always clearly separated. This is meant not only in a material sense;while creativity is a natural gift, it is not culturally neutral. Humans have used their creative powers for productive, protective, and destructive ends, and a given anthropogenic creative action (such as landscape alteration) may well be interpreted by different people as all three. In our twenty-first century, the rapid changes of global markets, national and international hyper-capitalism, and technology’s quantum leaps have created a threatening climate characterized by a general sense of unpreparedness. As I stated in chapter 2, these have been aptly termed,"post-normal times." In such times, economists, high-tech people, business executives, philosophers, and self-appointed leaders of creative technologies and creative thought (the heroes of present-day entrepreneurship) all emphasize creativity as necessary for human individual and collective survival, often ignoring or repressing the danger of some creative ideas and technologies in the competition for power, national domination, and control. This repression or glossing over can be felt in this work's title, and it must be contested. Creativity may evolve in adversity, but it also thrives in cooperation and peacetime; creativity may protect from catastrophe, but Nazi Germany was unfortunately one of the most creative and calamitous nations in recent history.If creativity is to serve humanity, then it is by this very definition that it iswelcome. However, to the extent that criticism and deconstructionism ask difficult questions and bring out repressed themes that relate to danger and violence, creativity must not be sheltered from difficulty. This thesis serves as a torch shining alight on this dark corner of the concept of creativity, a much-needed (and somewhat unusual) approach in the creative age, all the more so in a nation-state that both self-identifies with it and culturally reveres it.
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הביטחוניות. לטענתי, מושג היצירתיות דומה למושג הגניוס )המח( היהודי ולמושג האינסוף שכן הוא מבטיח מאגר בלתי נדלה של רעיונות יצירתיים ופתרונות, או לחילופין יכולות אקסקלוסיביות מסוגים שונים, ועל כן הישרדותה הכלכלית והגיאופוליטית של ישראל יכולה להיות מובטחת באמצעים יצירתיים. יחד עם זאת, דעות אלו אינן מובעות בשלמותן באופן פומבי ומכאן נוכחותן הנסתרת שמקדמת מערך דעות אופטימיות בנוגע לעתידה של ישראל. שתי התמות מחזקות את התפיסה הפומבית של ישראל כישות נסית והיותן נסתרות מהשיח הציבורי תורמת לתחושה מוגברת של בטחון ואליטיזם לאומי המרגיעים את הפרנויה.
הפרק החמישי והאחרון מציע ניתוח ופרשנות להיעדר ההתייחסות ליצירתיות שלילית בממצאים האתנוגראפיים . מתוך מיקוד בהקשר הסוציו-פוליטי הישראלי, פרק זה מתייחס לשיחים מודחקים אודות יצירתיות שלילית וזדונית אשר באים לידי ביטוי באלימות פיזית, כלכלית ותרבותית כנגד מגוון מיעוטים פוסט-קולוניאליים בישראל, יהודים וערבים, והמשך שליטה על האוכלוסייה הפלסטינית בשטחים הכבושים. היכולת לנסח ביקורת חברתית זו נובעת מאבסטרקציה של הממצאים האתנוגרפיים )מה שנאמר בהם ומה שהושמט והודחק( דרך הקונספט של לאקאן - "מסמן-על" )master-signifier(. אני מכנה תרומה תיאורטית זו בשם "הערצה תרבותית", שמתייחסת למעמדה התרבותי של יצירתיות בישראל. אני מציע להשתמש באמצעי תיאורטי זה על מנת להמשיך ולחקור את מושג היצירתיות בהקשרים אחרים או, לחילופין, לחקור מושגים אחרים שנתונים להערצה תרבותית בדומה ליצירתיות בישראל. תובנות ביקורתיות אלו מקדמות את ההתייחסות לסוגיות מודחקות בשדה הנוגעות ליצירתיות זדונית ומצביעות על כך שיצירתיות נוטלת חלק משמעותי בשימור העדר הצדק והשוויון החברתי במובנם הרחב וכן בהפעלת סוגים שונים של אלימות בידי רשויות מדינתיות של משטר דמוקרטי. דרך תובנות אלו עבודה זו קוראת למיגורם של אותם ביטויים של היצירתיות הזדונית.
משחר ימיו של המחקר האקדמי המוקדש ליצירתיות, הדגשת יתרונותיה גברה באופן עקבי על ההתמודדות עם האפשרות שיצירתיות עשויה להיות מסוכנת או זדונית וזו הודחקה והושתקה, על אף שהיבטים אלה קיימים במושג במידה שווה. הדיסציפלינה האנתרופולוגית לא היתה שונה במובן זה. בנוגע ליצירתיות באופן כללי, אני גורס כי אין להכחיש את מרכיביה האפלים, ואף את אלו הזדוניים, אלא להכיר בהם כאמצעי להבנה מעמיקה, מורכבת והוליסטית יותר שלה. בתרבות הלאומית היהודית-ישראלית המוקסמת מיצירתיות, מושג זה מתיר את החיבור בין אליטיזם לפרנויה, שמאפשר את שימור התפיסה העצמית של ישראל כחלשה ובלתי ניתנת להשמדה בו-זמנית. פרשנות זו, מפתה ככל שתהיה, עשויה להיות הרת-אסון, ויש לבחון אותה בחשדנות ובמידת הביקורתיות הנדרשת.
מלות מפתח :יצירתיות; חדשנות; חיוביות; תרבות יהודית-ישראלית; ישראל
III
כנגד הקונבנציות של תרבותו. אני מראה כי, כמושג הוליסטי,היצירתיות אינה ניטרלית אלא מרובת פנים בכל הנוגע למוסריותה. אולם, בתהליך הפרגמנטציה שהמושג עובר, פניו השליליים אשר קיימים בכל ההיסטוריוגרפיות של שלוש מטאפורות הבסיס, מנותקות ממנו ומודחקות. המושג הופך להיות מובנה דרך היותו רווי באופן בלעדי בערכיו המוסריים. רעיונות אלה מהווים מפה תיאורטית המשמשת לניתוח הממצאים האתנוגראפיים.
הפרקים הבאים מציגים ממצאים אתנוגראפיים אלה ודרכם את מערך הדעות הפומבי והגלוי מחד, וכן זה הפרטי והסמוי יותר של יזמים ויוצרים, וכן של הציבור הרחב, מאידך, בכל הנוגע ליצירתיות יהודית-ישראלית. הפרק השלישי מציג את "קדמת הבמה" של מערך הדעות הנוגעות ליצירתיות, כלומר – תמות נפוצות במרחב הציבורי המתייחסות להצלחה יהודית-ישראלית ביזמות. הראשונה מכונה מודל "היוצר כילד" המבארת את הטענה הנפוצה של יוצרים ויזמים כי הלכי רוח והתנהגויות "ילדותיות" המתאפיינות בשחרור מכבלים חברתיים נחוצות לעשייה יצירתית ומאפיינות אותה. רעיונות אלה מועלים על נס באירועים המוקדשים ליצירתיות ואף נחשבים כאפיוני אישיות לאומית של תרבות ישראלית בת זמננו התורמים ליתרונה בעשייה יצירתית-יזמית. התמה השנייה היא "נסיות" )מהמילה "נס"(, קרי – קבלת הטענה האליטיסטית שכמות ואיכות ההישגים היצירתיים בישראל חריגה ו"נסית" ואף מהווה "התרסה בפני חוקי הטבע", במיוחד בהתחשב בתנאי הנחיתות הגיאופוליטיים של ישראל שמתפרשים לעתים כהתגלמות עכשווית של נרטיב הנרדפות והפרנויה היהודיים לאורך הדורות. לטענתי, שתי תמות אלו שזורות זו בזו ומשלימות זו את זו במובן ש"ילדותיות" נחוצה על מנת להשיג "נסיות" ושהישגים מרשימים, שניתן לכנות כמפרי חוקי טבע, כגון קיומה של ישראל והישגים אישיים בתחום היזמות, יוצאים נשכרים מהתנהגות ילדותית מתריסה ומהעדר משמעת. כל שלוש מטאפורות הבסיס אשר מקדמות את תפיסתו החיובית של מושג היצירתיות באות לידי ביטוי ברעיונות אלה.
הפרק הרביעי מהווה תמונת מראה לקודמו, שכן אינו מציג את קדמת הבמה אלא את אחורי הקלעים –דעות שהינן ביקורתיות ומוסתרות יותר אשר מאפיינות חלק מהאוכלוסייה העוסקת ביצירתיות. דעות אלו נעדרות מהשיח בספירה הציבורית שבקדמת הבמה. חלקו הראשון של פרק זה מתייחס ל"העדרותה הנסתרת של ביקורת" ובו אני מראה כי האינפורמנטים במחקר זה לעיתים מתייחסים בביקורתיות לתמות המובעות בקדמת הבמה ולמטאפורות הבסיס המקדמות אותן, אך ביקורת זו נדחקת לשולי השיח ולזירה חבויה של דעות אישיות שאני מכנה "היעדרות נסתרת". כאשר ביקורת זו נעדרת ונסתרת, ההגמוניה של קדמת הבמה אינה מאותגרת על ידי שיחים אלטרנטיביים. הדבר מחייב ניסוח מחדש של הגדרות הנוגעות ליצירתיות שלילית, כזה המכיר בכח אורה החיובי של היצירתיות להטיל צל. רוצה לומר -מכיר בכוחה של החיוביות לייצר יצירתיות בעלת אופי שלילי וכן בכוחו של מושג היצירתיות להדחיק את הביקורת אודות עצמו. חלקו השני של פרק זה מתייחס ל"נוכחות הנסתרת של חזקה כל-יכולה".אני מצביע על כך שהתמה של "נסיות" המופיעה בקדמת הבמה מזמנת הבניות לטנטיות המתייחסות להגזעה מעודנת שבמסגרתה אינפורמנטים רבים, רובים חילוניים, נאלצים להתמודד עם מידת נכונותם להכיר או לקבל מגוון משמעויות המתייחסות למונח "המח היהודי" והמיתולוגיה המתלווה אליו. בנוסף, אני מראה שמידת הקרבה האפיסטמולוגית בין יצירתיות לבין סוד, אינסוף ועמימות תואמת את הסימביוזה ההיסטורית בין יצירתיות טכנולוגית בישראל לצבא ולתעשיות
II
תקציר
"צומח מתוך מצוקה, מגן מפני כליה, שמור מפני אתגור": מושג היצירתיות בקונטקסט הלאומי היהודי-ישראלי
יואל טוויל
דיסרטציה זו מהווה ניתוח תרבותי ביקורתי המבוסס על מחקר אתנוגראפי הבוחן את מארג המשמעויות החיוביות של מושג היצירתיות באופן כללי, ובהקשר של הלאומיות היהודית- ישראלית בפרט. מחקר זה מושתת על שתי הבחנות בסיסיות: הראשונה היא כי הממדים השיחניים, אשר מבנים את מושג היצירתיות, מכוננים אותו כבעל מאפיינים פוזיטיביים באופן כמעט אוניברסלי ; השנייה היא כי יצירתיות מהווה מרכיב משמעותי בפולקלור היהודי ובנרטיבים בולטים בציונות. מושג היצירתיות אף משמש כמטונימה בת-זמננו לתרבות היהודית- ישראלית מעצם המשגתה של ישראל כמעצמה יזמית, "אומת סטארט-אפ". שתי הבחנות אלו נשזרות זו בזו במחקר אודות ההיבטים החיוביים של היצירתיות בהקשרים של לאומיות ישראלית. הקשרים אלה מכונים בעבודה זו "מערך )נקסוס( אליטיזם-פרנויה", קרי – חוויית בטחון לאומית מועצמת המבוססת על ייחוס עצמי של עליונות אינטלקטואלית ועורמה הישרדותית מחד, במקביל לחשש עמוק מפני כליה מאידך. מארג התכתובות התמאטיות בין נרטיבים אלה והפרקטיקות הנלוות אליהם, כמו גם ההבניות של יצירתיות )שלילית וחיובית( שנובעות מהן, נבחנות במגוון אתרים אתנוגראפיים, בהם פועלים אינפורמנטים המעורבים בתחום היזמות הישראלית או, במילים אחרות, באדפטציה הלוקאלית של יצירתיות כמושג גלובלי. המחקר מבוסס על עבודת שדה אשר נערכה לאורך 4 שנים, בין השנים 2010-2014. רובה המוחלט של עבודת שדה זו מורכב מתצפית משתתפת ב- 18 תערוכות של חדשנות טכנולוגית, 10 אי-כנסים )פורמט ייחודי המוקדש כולו לטיפוח יצירתיות(, 5 תחרויות נוער, סמסטר של כיתת ממציאים צעירים בבית ספר יסודי, 32 ראיונות עם יזמים ויוצרים וקשר ארוך טווח לאורך כל תקופת עבודת השדה עם מספר אינפורמנטים מרכזיים.
פרק המבוא מציג את שאלות המחקר ואת ההיפותזות של עבודה זו, כמו גם את ההקשרים התיאורטיים, המתודולוגיים וסקירת הספרות הנוגעים ליצירתיות כפי שהיא מתקשרת לאליטיזם ופרנויה יהודית וישראלית. לאחריו,מתעמק הפרק השני במניע לעבודה זו, הנובע מהעדר איזון בספרות האקדמית המתייחסת ליצירתיות וסוקרת אותה בדיסציפלינות השונות, לרבות אנתרופולוגיה, כיכולת אנושית רצויה וחיובית בלבד.לנוכח זאת, הפרק השני עושה שימוש בגישה ביקורתית ודה-קונסטרוקטיבית ל"כתיבתה" של יצירתיות. בהסתמך על הגותם של פוקו ודרידה, הנני בוחן מערך רחב של מקורות אקדמיים אינטר-דיסציפלינריים המתייחס ליצירתיות ומחלץ ממנו מספר תמות נפוצות המסבירות את ההכרה האוניברסלית בחיוביות של מושג היצירתיות. אני מאתר שלוש מטאפורות בסיס מסוג זה: "האל שבאדם", המתייחסת למספר המשגות של הניצוץ האלוהי היצירתי כפי שבא לידי ביטוי בעשייה אנושית, בין אם מקורותיו מוכרים כאלוהיים ובין אם כחוויות שיא סקולאריות ; "מודרניות וקפיטליזם", המתייחסת לחשיבותם של מוצרים חדשניים וככזו המזהה את היצירתיות כמאפיינת קידמה; האחרונה הינה "פועלות, מאבק והתנגדות" אשר מתייחסת לאהדה בסיסית כלפי היצירתיות ההישרדותית של דמויות ארכיטיפיות המאופיינות בחולשה וכן להרואיות התרבותית של האדם היצירתי הפועל
I
הצהרת תלמיד המחקר עם הגשת עבודת הדוקטור לשיפוט
אני החתום מטה מצהיר/ה בזאת:
___ חיברתי את חיבורי בעצמי, להוציא עזרת ההדרכה שקיבלתי מאת מנחה/ים.
___ החומר המדעי הנכלל בעבודה זו הינו פרי מחקרי מתקופת היותי
תלמיד/ת מחקר.
___ בעבודה נכלל חומר מחקרי שהוא פרי שיתוף עם אחרים, למעט עזרה טכנית הנהוגה בעבודה ניסיונית. לפי כך מצורפת בזאת הצהרה על תרומתי ותרומת שותפי למחקר, שאושרה על ידם ומוגשת בהסכמתם.
תאריך 28/1/18 שם התלמיד/ה יואל טוויל
חתימה ______העבודה נעשתה בהדרכת
פרופסור ניצה ינאי
במחלקה לסוציולוגיה ואנתרופולוגיה
בפקולטה למדעי הרוח והחברה "צומח מתוך מצוקה, מגן מפני כליה, שמור מפני אתגור": מושג היצירתיות בקונטקסט הלאומי היהודי-ישראלי
מחקר לשם מילוי חלקי של הדרישות לקבלת תואר "דוקטור לפילוסופיה"
מאת
יואל טוויל
הוגש לסינאט אוניברסיטת בן-גוריון בנגב
(5/12/18) אישור המנחה ______
אישור דיקן בית הספר ללימודי מחקר מתקדמים ע"ש קרייטמן______
יב' בשבט תשע"ח 28 ינואר 2018
באר-שבע "צומח מתוך מצוקה, מגן מפני כליה, שמור מפני אתגור": מושג היצירתיות בקונטקסט הלאומי היהודי-ישראלי
מחקר לשם מילוי חלקי של הדרישות לקבלת תואר "דוקטור לפילוסופיה"
מאת
יואל טוויל
הוגש לסינאט אוניברסיטת בן-גוריון בנגב
יב' בשבט תשע"ח 28 בינואר 2018
באר שבע