For the second edition of this book interview series, I sat down with Prof. Michael Hanchett Hanson to talk about his latest book, Creative Work and Distributions of Power. This conversation felt especially meaningful to me not only because of the book’s relevance, but because Michael has deeply shaped the way I think about creativity. He’s been a brilliant mentor, an intellectual guide, and a good friend over the years.
But let me introduce him to you first. Prof. Hanchett Hanson is a developmental psychologist who looks at the lifelong development of creativity and the very concept that this is something we develop. He studied with Howard Gruber many years ago and over the decades have elaborated on his ideas. Gruber was a protégé of the famous developmental psychologist Jean Piaget and applied Piaget’s systemic view of normative child development to non-normative – that is, creative – development across life span. When Howard became too sick to teach, Michael took over his course and during the last 2 ½ decades have combined his systemic view of development with sociocultural systems views of creativity and distributed cognition theory. That process has led him to an ever-greater appreciation of the challenges, importance, and dangers of creative work while challenging common ideas about individual creativity.
Working alongside a group of outstanding scholars, Michael has played a key role in shaping the participatory creativity framework, an approach that’s been central to my own work and research. As he described it, this framework is part of a larger shift in creativity studies, one that embraces more dynamic, systemic views of how creativity unfolds. What I find especially compelling is how the participatory approach centers on the challenges and experiences of individuals engaged in creative work within interconnected historical, social, technological, and material systems.
To start, a meta question for you: why did you decide to write Creative Work and Distributions of Power? Was there a particular gap you felt needed to be addressed, or did the book grow out of a personal or professional turning point?
This is the second in a three-book series that I am writing for Routledge about Creativity in Practice. The series uses this case-study method to examine different topics. Most methodologies in psychology are inherently reductive, isolating specific variables and examining each variable independently. In contrast, Gruber wanted to study complex dynamics – interactions of variables in specific contexts – and so designed a rigorous approach to case-study research (the evolving systems approach to case-study research), which I have expanded over the years to include more concerns about social and material dynamics and feedback loops.
The first book in the Creativity in Practice series looked at different ways in which people who do creative work get their educations, and in writing that book it became apparent that the roles of power in creative research was undertheorized in the participatory framework. Worse, it has been largely ignored by creativity research in general. That’s shocking: a field of research on how unexpected change (“creativity”) happens and is evaluated in personal lives, in societies, and across history ignores the concept of power?
But I and the students who assisted me in writing Creative Work and Distributions of Power did not want to just make that point. We needed real, nuanced theory that could bridge the equally big concepts of power and creativity. I knew that Gregory Bateson’s work on systems theory was relevant to the participatory framework. He applied systems theories to a wide range of fields and phenomena, and he was particularly interested in creative work, as well as how people thought and learned.
I’d had Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind on my bookshelf since graduate school but had only reads bits of it. This was an opportunity to really dive into his work. As I would learn, that is no small task. The major focus of my own work was studying his ideas for almost two years. It was like getting another doctorate. His views of levels of learning and communication and double binds alone were almost overwhelmingly rich in implications for creative work. In addition, Bateson was quite critical of common uses of the idea of power, which set up a richly generative dialogue for the book.
That’s true, Bateson’s ideas are undeniable rich and nuanced. His case study and ideas do ground the book, but you cover a lot of other ideas.
Yes, again, the goal was to bridge systems views of creativity and power. We link Bateson’s work to the work of Michel Foucault, Pierre Boudieu, Phillip Guddemi, and Tara J. Yosso.
We also needed other cases. Analysis of the development of Bateson’s own views served as a way of thinking about those same views in relation to creative development, but we also needed different cases as a beginning of a proof of concept. The previous book in the series had six cases from very different domains so that was a starting place. Then we added within Creative Work and Distributions of Power an extended case on the early work of the musician, fashion designer and videographer, Tyler, The Creator. It’s hard to imagine two cases that would be more different in domains, in social and material contexts, and in course of development than Gregory Bateson and Tyler, The Creator. The comparison of the two cases in relation to the theories was a fascinating process, and I think it worked. The comparisons brought out nuances that are not immediately obvious from the theories alone.
The book has an extraordinary structure. You weave together the Bateson and Tyler, The Creator cases and the theories you mentioned, as well as personal reflections in a very distinctive way that’s easy to follow and, well, fun. I particularly enjoyed that even the book itself participates in the discussion via metalogues. How did you decide on that structure? What was it like to bring all those threads together?
Challenging and exciting. Bateson used metalogues in the form of imagined dialogues with his daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, perpetually 9 years old in the metalogues. He used these metalogues to explore difficult ideas in a way that was relational and without jargon. In the proposal for this book, I said that we wanted to include metalogues, but neither I nor my team were sure how that would work. After some experimentation, we came up with tracing the development of the book itself through metalogues between the “AUTHORS” (me and the writing support team) and the “BOOK” as it was emerging. This allowed us to illustrate the idea of material actors in the creative process, to give a peek into the thinking underlying the book, to break up the rhythm of the text, and to go more deeply into specific concerns. The BOOK, which takes on a rather feisty persona, also stands in for readers’ concerns and objections. Like I said, it was quite a challenge to put together, but from the responses of editors and readers, it seems to work.
It surely does. I have to say that some of the BOOK’s “thoughts” were the same as what I was thinking at that moment, so it was a helpful way to clarify the theories and ideas as you read through it. And that process comes together in a particular vision of how power and creative work interact. Can you summarize the message of the book in a few sentences?
Probably not. Maybe multiple short answers? You see, the answer to your question depends on the reader’s interests. At the most basic level, part of the book is an extended case about Bateson and his theories. If you’re interested in some of his key ideas, this is a good starting place. Another substantial part is about the work of Tyler, The Creator, and his fans may be interested in that. In case-study research we call those the intrinsic findings, what we learn about specific people and their creative work.
We also talk about instrumental findings, more general ideas that people can use, adapt, elaborate, or revise. For people doing creative work as well as those pursuing creative research, the book offers a model of how to understand our own local creative eco-systems – the people, technologies, materials, and environments with which we interact every day. These local, distributed systems are key to recognizing resources, maintaining generative social and material dynamics, and defining the sense of purpose that both drives and emerges from the work itself. Then we lay out how to think about our local eco-systems amid the mind-boggling complexity of larger social, technological, political, and economic dynamics. I believe that this model is particularly important at today as conventional ways of living are being destabilized in so many ways and so many people feel powerless.
Which brings me to a more general idea from the book. We propose a way to think about power in relation to creative work, based on the expression of individual capacities in relationships to other people and society as a whole.
This is definitely a great way to introduce complexity to a “linear object” such as a book: you don’t necessarily need to read it cover to cover, but can go back and forth depending on what you are looking for. However, Power is in the title of the book so that’s important. Having read it, I think the concept of power lays the foundation for all of the topics you cover.
As I mentioned before, the approach adapts and elaborates multiple theories of power, particularly Phillip Guddemi’s application of Bateson’s work. We all have sustainable ranges of various capacities and available time that we invest in our relationships. Long-term suppression of those capacities, ranging from a stultifying job to political suppression of ideas to economic oppression, harms individuals and the systems in which they participate. At the other end of the spectrum, pressure to work beyond our capacities for extended periods – from burnout to exploitation to enslavement – again harms people and systems. The whole social system loses flexibility and is less able to adapt to changes.
Note that this vision of power dynamics neither vilifies nor glorifies power but recognizes the exchanges of capacities in all relations, dynamics which amount to what we generally think of as power. People are constantly looking for sustainable power relations in their teachers, their communities, and their leaders. Those same kinds of relationships can veer into skewed dynamics that are quite oppressive to people and milk the social system of its resources and flexibility. Bateson based his views largely on biological and ecological systems, and there we can see the continual give-and-take of resources usually functioning within sustainable ranges. There are extreme weather conditions, but over time they also modulate into sustainable rhythms. These systems can even adapt to human activities that harm them for a long time, but along the way, individual species and ecosystems are lost. And, as we increasingly see today, ultimately the flexibility breaks down, which can lead to more extensive system collapse.
In the book, you use the case studies to explore how this view of power applies to creative work. From looking at those cases, how do you think this approach to power can help people doing creative work?
It helps identify resources and possibilities. In line with Bateson’s critique of the common ideas about “power,” we move away from thinking of it as a simple quantity that people have or do not have and move toward thinking about flexibility that emerges within our relations, where the exercise of power and recognition of possibilities to act that others do not see – creative work – are closely linked. Is that the concise answer you wanted two questions ago?
Maybe, but it’s now clear to me that it is hard to summarize the book in just a few sentences. Now, I have another question. You’ve brought up the writing team a few times, and behind every book is a group of people who help shape it, even if they don’t appear in the text. Here, they are part of the book. Can you tell me about that?
Both of the books in this Routledge series have been group efforts. I’ve done the writing, but a group of extraordinary, former graduate students have helped in the conception, research, and editing. Creative Work and Distributions of Power could not have happened without this support team – Dr. Ana Inés Jorge-Artigau, Associate Professor, Universidad Austral in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Dr. Benjamin Dickman, Department of Mathematics, The Hewitt School, New York City, USA; Dr. Joseph I. Eisman, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA; Sam Piede, doctoral candidate, philosophy of education, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York City, USA; and Stella Wasenitz, doctoral candidate and Lecturer, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany. I also had a terrific artist work with me on the cover and illustrations.
This team helped choose the cases, conduct the research, think about perspectives to take, what to cut and what to add. They were a great team.
This was surely a great team to work with – and I had a lot of fun working on the cover and illustrations of the book. Was there a chapter that was particularly difficult or challenging to write? And is there one chapter that you feel most personally connected to?
The metalogues were both the most personal and the most challenging. By giving the BOOK its own voice as it was emerging, the nuances, misgivings, and limitations of the cases analyses could be thought out-loud and explored in writing. For me at least, it really is wonderful way to write, and my favorite lines are the BOOK at its feistiest. But then the editing is a different challenge than editing the academic prose. Everything explored in drafting the metalogues is not useful for the reader so there’s a lot of cutting and crafting to do. The rhythms, tone, and relationship established in these dialogues are more like editing a script that has to be very tight and always anchored to the ideas in the other chapters.
Writing a book is its own kind of creative journey. Were there any moments during the process when your own ideas about creativity or power changed or became clearer just from the act of writing?
From looking at hundreds of case studies over the years, I do not believe you can separate the actions from ideas in creative work, including the kind of theory construction we did in this book. Writing is thinking and so there were insights every day, some dead-ends, many small elaborations, and some big Ah-ha moments. Probably the most important breakthrough was seeing the value of Phillip Guddemi’s concept of power, which he had based on Bateson’s work. Phillip is one of the leading authorities on Bateson’s work. I was already in contact with him and knew that he had specifically written about power, a concept that I planned to cite and discuss as I focused more on the ideas of Foucault and Bourdieu. In the writing process, though, I saw how incredibly useful and subtle this view of power was. As we acknowledge in the book we are using Guddemi’s concept of power with some elaborations that come from the application to the cases of creative work. So, yes as you noted earlier, there are lots of people involved in a project like this, a participatory process as we say.
If you want to read Creative Work and Distributions of Power, you can order it on Amazon here. Michael Hanchett Hanson can be found on his lab website, LinkedIn, Google Scholar, and ResearchGate.