Thinking about Re-creativity and Its Limits

Creative Violence, Playful Creativity and Symbolic Misery

Abstract

This paper investigates the transformation of the creative attitude shaped by marketing and digital technologies, from a philosophical point of view. First, I describe Deleuze’s theory of artistic and conceptual creation, then I consider it as a good starting point to check up the relations and differences between art and commercial advertising. Finally, I criticize de Kerckhove’s perspective. For it is based on a optimistic consideration of collective and connective intelligence through which he builds his re-creative dimension’s theory of aesthetics and politics.             The central arguments of my critic are the meaning of resistance, which de Kerckhove removes from his vocabulary, and the notion of symbolic misery, elaborated by Bernard Stiegler. With this notion, Stiegler denounces the reduction of cognitive capacities and affective skills produced by the logic of consumption. In this sense, while de Kerckhove is right in stating that the logic of consumption marks the plots of subjectivity, he does not draw the proper consequences from this observation. Following Stiegler and developing his theory, I try to provide that the increase of creative attitudes is an ethical–political problem of contemporary age, not an evidence linked to the web and new media.