Uno de los cambios más llamativos de las sociedades contemporáneas remite a la noción de creatividad. Si hasta fechas recientes esta se encarnaba en una minoría social especialmente dotada para engendrar la novedad en el mundo del arte, hoy su radio de acción se ha expandido hasta alcanzar los lugares más recónditos de la vida social. De algún modo, se ha normalizado y se ha hecho norma. Su presencia puebla y define los contornos de la vida cotidiana. No solo en el arte, como en el curso de la modernidad, también en la política, la economía, la ciencia, la tecnología, el deporte, etc., la creatividad se ha convertido en la sociedad tardomoderna en el nuevo destino social. Los individuos no solo quieren, también deben ser creadores, ajustarse lo máximo posible a la figura del artista de principios del siglo pasado que expresaba su vida en la obra de arte. Precisamente esta reubicación de la creatividad como valor social hegemónico obliga a las ciencias sociales a repensar definiciones e interpretaciones heredadas que no se reconocen en la situación actual. La sociología contemporánea rastrea el papel de una creatividad que, frente a la dimensión minoritaria y transgresora de antaño, hoy se ha democratizado y rutinizado.

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.

La creatividad tiene que ver con la aparición de algo imprevisto, así que el observador está obligado a aceptar positivamente su ignorancia e igualmente el carácter excesivo de la realidad respecto al orden social instituido. El capitalismo contemporáneo parece tener esto en cuenta, pues ya no solo explota el trabajo y la información o el conocimiento, sino también lo indeterminado, considerado por Anaximandro como el origen de la realidad. Los mitos de muerte y renacimiento e igualmente los ritos de paso permiten tratar con esa nada. Otra vía es el consumo de enteógenos, los cuales, además, permiten transitar de la creatividad a la sabiduría. Es posible embarcarse en ella a través de la autoiniciación, método que está en las antípodas del repertorio de metodologías que utiliza la sociología para medir las propiedades de la acción social.

Providing a critical overview of our understanding of creativity, this text addresses fundamental issues in the field. The contributors address questions such as: How is the creative person socially constructed? And what are the economic and social factors in the production of art?

The ideas presented in this book have been incubating for over 25 years. I was in the first grade, I believe, when the ideas that eventually developed into this social psychology of creativity first began to germinate. The occasion was art class, a weekly Friday afternoon event during which we were given small reproductions of the great masterworks and asked to copy them on notepaper using the standard set of eight Crayola® crayons. I had left kindergarten the year before with encour agement from the teacher about developing my potential for artistic creativity. During these Friday afternoon exercises, however, I developed nothing but frus tration. Somehow, Da Vinci's "Adoration of the Magi" looked wrong after I'd fin ished with it. I wondered where that promised creativity had gone. I began to believe then that the restrictions placed on my artistic endeavors contributed to my loss of interest and spontaneity in art. When, as a social psy chologist, I began to study intrinsic motivation, it seemed to me that this moti vation to do something for its own sake was the ingredient that had been missing in those strictly regimented art classes. It seemed that intrinsic motivation, as defined by social psychologists, might be essential to creativity. My research pro gram since then has given considerable support to that notion. As a result, the social psychology of creativity presented in this book gives prominence to social variables that affect motivational orientation.