Creative Complexity

Creative Practice, Complexity and the Creative Economy Research Symposium, at Birmingham Business School on 31^st May, 2012.

My only previous experience of complexity theory was a short seminar in Oxford’s Said Business School, largely run by ex-theoretical physicists. I probably understood less than a third of it. I did understand Ronald Barnett’s excellent book, Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity (1999), which here is a bit beside the point. Complexity theory itself is evidently now undergoing a ‘cultural turn’ and being used to investigate creative industry networks, clusters, social interaction and the collaborative dimension of creative and cultural production.Complexity theory generally attempts to look at phenomena in terms of multiple interactions, interdependencies and the dynamic process-based change within and between systems or organisms. The symposium was actually the last in a research project, and introduced by the main project leaders, Roberta Comunian, Caroline Chapain, and Katerina Alexiou. Every paper was strong, and comprised three strands of ‘networks’, ‘education’ and ‘design’.

What I relate to in complexity theory, despite many of the research methods used here are common to other frameworks (from cognitive mapping to interviews), is the need to consider the organizational formations and seemingly random and contingent process-based nature of creative production. It also demands more of researchers in terms of getting embedded or involved in cultural projects, and developing a dialogue between the theory-development and the more ethnographic data gathering. Each of the symposium papers I felt came from a position of experience, as well as knowledge, which made them more credible. In a way, the subject of this symposium highlights something within creative industries research that our Centre here at Warwick has been trying to do in cultural policy – making theory and practice ‘co-creative’, (to use a trendy term). In many approaches to creative economy research, there is too much placing of static theoretical templates onto the vast and hybrid terrain of empirical data that is ‘cultural production’. In fact, the term ‘production’ itself can be misleading. The so-called ‘creative economy’ often doesn’t come together as a coherent research object; it is not one ‘system’, and does not function according to hermetic organs of economic productivity. It comprises many dynamic spheres of production interconnected into other regions of economic life, but also ‘un’-productive and positively un-economically viable socio-urban life. 

There was an awful lot of content to this symposium, which I can't begin to summarise here. I arrived at three conclusions: we need to differentiate between different forms of complexity outside regulative concepts like ‘production’ (which demands an ordering of data according to certain economic presuppositions);we also need to distinguish between the complexity generated by the creative process and the complexity of such activities negotiating extraneous system-regimes (social, financial, institutional), and thus gauge the relativity of 'necessity-contingency' as it changes from place to place or activity to activity. Third: how does complexity in creative activity offer the appearance of diversity and endless possibility, but is however directed by fairly consistent regimes of power, particularly it seems in the closed expert networks that seem to come up with the most well-publicised achievements.

To find out more about the project:
http://www.complexity-creative-economy.net/index.html

Jonathan Vickery : 06 Jun 2012 14:00 |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem