Fooling Around

Book excerpt: Some old ideas can become very new. This is the case of the notion of creativity in psychology. Traditionally conceptualized in the narrow framework of the amazing things poets, composers, painters, and scientists do, creativity research had reached an impassé in its efforts to locate creativity within the confines of personality characteristics. This is the time for change. The New Look at creativity that is rooted within the sociocultural tradition in psychology and elaborated in the present book finds creativity in each and every moment of our everyday lives. We are creative when we move around in the streets, dance tango, fool around with our self-images while shopping for clothes, or resist pre-given recipes while cooking dinners. We are being creative even in our bedrooms where we perform the difficult tasks of falling asleep or waking up through arrays of sleep inducers and alarm clocks, not to speak of the time we spend in the very state of sleep. All our actions at night—ranging from what we later call nightmares--or dreams—are arenas of creativity even if we may barely remember what we have done. The present monograph by Lene Tanggaard constitutes a powerful multi-pronged exposition of the New Look at Creativity. Its starting point is in the move to pay attention to the processes of acting in everyday life—rather than start from the classification of products of human actions into classes of “creative” versus “non-creative.”