Creativity in the Making - Vygotsky’s Contemporary Contribution to Crativity

Moran & John-Steiner / 30 In summary, creativity operates through the person appropriating, making sense and meaning from, and externalizing tools, signs and artifacts. Underpinning this dialectical process is conscious awareness of one’s own and others’ subjective, emotional experiences in interaction with the world. Creativity is, as Feldman (1980) puts it, a “transformational imperative” of everyone. Most who engage in it do not make a major impact on cultural domains; they go unrecognized in the dialectic of creativity. “Turning our attention to the collective creativity, which unites all these insignificant fragments, comes the realization of what a great part belongs to the collective creative work or unknown inventors” (Vygotsky quoted in Smolucha, 1992, p. 53). For Vygotsky, there is neither such a thing as a truly independent creator nor any basic difference in creative process between the “primitive story reteller” and “famous creator” (Vygotsky, 1971). Both rework the materials that are culturally available to them.

What is the relationship of emotion to creativity?

"Art is the social technique of emotion, a tool of society which brings the most intimate and personal aspects of our being into the circle of social life."19 Now we turn our attention to the microlevel of creativity (which is not separate but in continuous dialectic with the macrolevel), further exploring the inner manifestations and transformations that occur within a person as s/he engaged in creative activity. Vygotsky’s work on cognition is well known, but he also included emotion as a key component of development and creativity. As a brief example, Vygotsky (1999) wrote a short essay at the end of his life on the psychological “paradox of the actor” (p. 244). The actor embodies feelings that become what the entire audience feels. But these embodied feelings are not the actor’s real feelings; the actor does not “live through” or subjectively experience the emotions s/he conveys. Still, they are interpreted as real by the audience. How does this occur? Vygotsky surmised that understanding of this phenomenon lies in the intersection of the qualities of the actor and the general psychological and ideological patterns prevalent in the specific culture at the specific historical period. The actor draws from “idealized passions” that are similar to the conventional literary or artistic forms on which novelists and sculptors draw. The “art” of the actor is the crystallization of these social passions in dialectic with the audience. Therefore, through art, emotions can be objective as well as subjective. In this section, we look at the subjective role of emotions in creativity and in the next section we broaden the discussion to look at the objective, social role of emotions specific to art.

Perezhivanija: what a person “lives through” “[T]he essential factors which explain the influence of environment on the psychological development of children, and on the development of their conscious personalities, are made up of their emotional experiences [perezhivanija].”20