Action and movement, memory and social creativity

pp. 13-39

in: José M. Dominguès, Social creativity, collective subjectivity and contemporary modernity, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000

Abstract

The concept of social memory has played an important role in the social sciences, whether or not it has been always directly conceptualized as such. In contrast, only more recently has the notion of creativity started to find its own place. Apart from conceptually vague movements such as the Lebensphilosophie, which runs from Herder through Schopenhauer to Nietzsche and Bergson, creativity has not been clearly defined in modern thinking, in particular in the social sciences (Joas, 1992: chap. 2). Since Kant renounced treating imagination — which ends up relegated to the realm of aesthetics — as crucial to the notion of reason (Markus, 1994; Rundell, 1994), creativity became a mute point. Especially in sociology it has remained what Joas (1992: 15–16) has called, following Parsons' terminology, a "residual category"; namely one which is unavoidably alluded to, for it is necessary to speak of empirical phenomena, but without explicit and precise elaboration. Some important recent conceptual advances notwithstanding, a great deal still needs to be done, in particular because the notion of creativity cannot be simply superimposed on the existent body of knowledge, demanding as it does a deeper reassessment of some key sociological ideas. This gap is conceptually problematic in both the daily life and the historical-evolutionary dimensions.