Creativity and Time: A Sociological Exploration

Series: Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture

This book defends that the pursuit of originality constitutes one of the most important characteristics of creativity, but that originality refers, etymologically, to both origin and originary. Hence, the book is structured into two parts, dedicated, respectively, to the creative categories of origin and the creative categories of originary. Within the former are creation myths, games – the origin of all cultural activity, the dialectic chaos-order, axial civilizations – the germ of our time, and the struggle between generations – a factor of social transformation, and, within the second, creative capitalism, creative work in the context of the global economy of risk and uncertainty, and representative democracy. However, these two concepts are not isolated, but deeply interrelated, in a way that explains how creative originality builds a temporal narrative. It has been dislocated in late modernity and, with it, creativity has been broken.