Creativity (8 page)

An extremely lucid example of how the internalization of the system works is given by the inventor Jacob Rabinow. At first, he talks about the importance of what I have called the
domain
:

Next Rabinow brings up what the
person
must contribute, which is mainly a question of motivation, or the enjoyment one feels when playing (or working?) with the contents of the domain:

Finally he focuses on how important it is to reproduce in one’s mind the criteria of judgment that the
field
uses:

He was asked what constitutes “junk.” Is it something that doesn’t work, or—

It would be very difficult to improve on this description of how the systems model works after it is internalized. Drawing on over eighty years of varied experience, Rabinow has distilled with great insight what is involved in being a creative inventor. And as his words suggest, the same process holds for other domains, whether poetry, music, or physics.

T
o be creative, a person has to internalize the entire system that makes creativity possible. So what sort of person is likely to do that? This question is very difficult to answer. Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals. If nothing else, this distinguishes them from the rest of us. But there does not seem to be a particular set of traits that a person must have in order to come up with a valuable novelty. What John Reed, the CEO of Citicorp, who has thought quite a lot about
such things, says about businesspeople could be applied to creative persons in other domains as well:

The same is true for scientists: What leads to an important discovery doesn’t matter as long as you play by the rules. Or for artists: You can be a happy extrovert like Raphael, or a surly introvert like Michelangelo—the only thing that matters is how good your paintings are judged to be. This is all well and true; yet at the same time it is somewhat disappointing. After all, to say that what makes a person creative is his or her creativity is a tautology. Can we do any better? We don’t really have very sound evidence, let alone proof, but we can venture some rather robust and credible su
ggestions.

Perhaps the first trait that facilitates creativity is a
genetic predisposition
for a given domain. It makes sense that a person whose nervous system is more sensitive to color and light will have an advantage in becoming a painter, while someone born with a perfect pitch will do well in music. And being better at their respective domains, they will become more deeply interested in sounds and colors, will learn more about them, and thus are in a position to innovate in music or art with greater ease.

On the other hand, a sensory advantage is certainly not necessary. El Greco seems to have suffered from a disease of the optic nerve, and Beethoven was functionally deaf when he composed some of his greatest work. Although most great scientists seem to have been attracted to numbers and experimentation early in life, how creative they eventually became bears little relationship to how talented they were as children.

But a special sensory advantage may be responsible for developing an early
interest in the domain
, which is certainly an important ingredient of creativity. The physicist John Wheeler remembers being interested in “toy mechanisms, things that would shoot rubber bands, Tinkertoys, toy railroads, electric light bulbs, switches, buzzers.” His
father, who was a librarian, used to take him to New York State University, where he left John in the library office while he lectured. John was fascinated by the typewriters and other machines, especially hand calculators: “You pushed a button down and turned a crank, and how the thing worked, that intrigued me immensely.” When he was twelve, he built a primitive calculator that had gears whittled out of wood.

Without a good dose of curiosity, wonder, and interest in what things are like and in how they work, it is difficult to recognize an interesting problem. Openness to experience, a fluid attention that constantly processes events in the environment, is a great advantage for recognizing potential novelty. Every creative person is more than amply endowed with these traits. Here is how the historian Natalie Davis selects what historical projects to focus on:

Without such interest it is difficult to become involved in a domain deeply enough to reach its boundaries and then push them farther. True, it is possible to make one creative discovery, even a very important one, by accident and without any great interest in the topic. But contributions that require a lifetime of struggle are impossible without curiosity and love for the subject.

A person also needs
access to a domain
. This depends to a great extent on luck. Being born to an affluent family, or close to good schools, mentors, and coaches obviously is a great advantage. It does no good to be extremely intelligent and curious if I cannot learn what it takes to operate in a given symbolic system. The ownership of what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls “cultural capital” is a great resource. Those who have it provide their children with the advantage of an environment full of interesting books, stimulating conversation, expectations for educational advancement, role
models, tutors, useful connections, and so on.

But here too, luck is not everything. Some children fight their way
to the right schools while their peers stay behind. Manfred Eigen was captured by Russian troops at age seventeen and taken to a prisoner-of-war camp at the end of World War II, because he had been drafted to serve in an antiaircraft unit two years earlier. But he was determined to get back to studying science, even though he had had to leave high school at fifteen and never finished his studies. He escaped from the POW camp, walked back across half of Europe, and made a beeline for Göttingen, for he had heard that the best faculty in physics was reassembling there after the r
avages of the war. He reached the city before the university actually had a chance to open but was admitted later with the first cohort of students, even though he lacked a high school diploma. Caught up in the ascetic postwar dedication to scholarship, led by the most knowledgeable teachers, surrounded by other equally dedicated students, he made quick progress. A few years later he received his doctorate and in 1967 the Nobel Prize. It is true that in early childhood Eigen could draw on substantial cultural capital, because his family had been musical and intellectually ambitious. Nevertheless, few p
eople tossed by fate so far outside the circle of knowledge found their way back to its center as quickly and surely as he did.

Access to a field
is equally important. Some people are terribly knowledgeable but are so unable to communicate with those who matter among their peers that they are ignored or shunned in the formative years of their careers. Michelangelo was reclusive, but in his youth was able to interact with leading members of the Medici court long enough to impress them with his skill and dedication. Isaac Newton was equally solitary and cantankerous, but somehow convinced his tutor at Cambridge that he deserved a lifetime tenured fellowship at the university, and so was able to continue h
is work undisturbed by human contact for many years. Someone who is not known and appreciated by the relevant people has a very difficult time accomplishing something that will be seen as creative. Such a person may not have a chance to learn the latest information, may not be given the opportunity to work, and if he or she does manage to accomplish something novel, that novelty is likely to be ignored or ridiculed.

In the sciences, being at the right university—the one where the most state-of-the-art research is being done in the best equipped labs by the most visible scientists—is extremely important. George Stigler
describes this as a snowballing process, where an outstanding scientist gets funded to do exciting research, attracts other faculty, then the best students—until a critical mass is formed that has an irresistible appeal to any young person entering the field. In the arts, the attraction is more to the centers of distribution, now primarily New York City, where the major galleries and collectors are located. Just as a century ago aspiring young artists felt they had to go to Paris if they wanted to be recognized, now they feel that unless they run the gauntlet of Manhattan they don’t have a
chance. One can paint beautiful pictures in Alabama or North Dakota, but they are likely to be misplaced, ignored, and forgotten unless they get the stamp of approval of critics, collectors, and other gatekeepers of the field. Eva Zeisel’s work received the imprimatur of the art establishment after her ceramics were shown by the Museum of Modern Art. The same is true of the other arts: Michael Snow spent ten years in New York City to catch up with the field of jazz music, and writers have to make connections with the agents and publishers there.

Access to fields is usually severely restricted. There are many gates to pass, and bottlenecks form in front of them. Writers who want to catch the attention of an editor long enough to have their work read have to compete with thousands of similarly hopeful writers who have also submitted their manuscripts. The editor typically has only a few minutes to dedicate to each writer’s work, assuming he or she even glances at the submission in the first place. Getting a literary agent to sell the manuscript is no solution either, since a good agent’s attention is as difficult to get as that of an
editor.

Because of these bottlenecks, access to a field is often determined by chance or by irrelevant factors, such as having good connections. Students applying to good universities in some disciplines are so many and have such excellent credentials that it is difficult to rank them in any meaningful way. Yet the openings are few, so a selection must be made. Hence the joke that the admissions committee throws all the application folders down a long stairway, and the students whose files travel farthest get admitted.

T
HE
T
EN
D
IMENSIONS OF
C
OMPLEXITY

Access to the domain and access to the field are all well and good, but when are we going to deal with the
real
characteristics of creative
persons? When do we get to the interesting part—the tortured souls, the impossible dreams, the agony and the ecstasy of creation? The reason I hesitate to write about the deep personality of creative individuals is that I am not sure that there is much to write about, since creativity is the property of a complex system, and none of its components alone can explain it. The personality of an individual who is to do something creative must adapt itself to the particular domain, to the conditions of a particular field, which vary at different times and from domain to domain.

Giorgio Vasari in 1550 noted with chagrin that the new generations of Italian painters and sculptors seemed to be very different from their predecessors of the early Renaissance. They tended to be savage and mad, wrote the good Vasari, whereas their elders and betters had been tame and sensible. Perhaps Vasari was reacting to the artists who had embraced the ideology of Mannerism, the style ushered in by Michelangelo near the end of his long career, which relied on interesting distortions of figures and on grand gestures. This style would have been considered ugly a hundred years e
arlier, and the painters who used it would have been shunned. But a few centuries later, at the height of the Romantic period, an artist who was not more than a little savage and mad would not have been taken very seriously, because these qualities were de rigueur for creative souls.

In the 1960s, when abstract expressionism was the reigning style, those art students who tended to be sullen, brooding, and antisocial were thought by their teachers to be very creative. They were encouraged, and they won the prizes and fellowships. Unfortunately, when these students left school and tried to establish careers in the art world, they found that being antisocial did not get them very far. To get the attention of dealers and critics they had to throw wild parties and be constantly seen and talked about. Hence a hecatomb of introverted artists ensued: Most were selected
out, ending up as art teachers in the Midwest or as car salesmen in New Jersey. Then the Warhol cohort replaced the abstract expressionists, and it was young artists with cool, clever, flip personalities who projected the aura of creativity. This, too, was a transient mask. The point is that you cannot assume the mantle of creativity just by assuming a certain personality style. One can be creative by living like a monk, or by burning the candle at both ends. Michelangelo was not greatly fond of women, while Picasso couldn’t get enough of them. Both changed
the domain of painting, even though their personalities had little in common.

Are there then no traits that distinguish creative people? If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it would be
complexity
. By this I mean that they show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes—instead of being an “individual,” each of them is a “multitude.” Like the color white that includes all the hues in the spectrum, they tend to bring together the entire range of human possibilities within themselves.

These qualities are present in all of us, but usually we are trained to develop only one pole of the dialectic. We might grow up cultivating the aggressive, competitive side of our nature, and disdain or repress the nurturant, cooperative side. A creative individual is more likely to be both aggressive and cooperative, either at the same time or at different times, depending on the situation. Having a complex personality means being able to express the full range of traits that are potentially present in the human repertoire but usually atrophy because we think that one or the othe
r pole is “good,” whereas the other extreme is “bad.”