We look at creative work as though the very creative process itself is something good. These are tools of expression, and like any tool, you can use them to damage something or to make something. They can be turned to very malign purposes, for instance, in the operas of Wagner. So I wanted to do this set of books, I want to show what is kind of the basic DNA that people use for good or for ill. What are the tools they use, if you like, of expression that they use in the creative process?
Richard Sennett grew up in the Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago, attended the Juilliard School in New York, and then studied social relations at Harvard. Over the last five decades, he has written about social life in cities, changes in labour, and social theory. His books include The Performer: Art, Life, Politics, The Hidden Injuries of Class, The Fall of Public Man, The Corrosion of Character, The Culture of the New Capitalism, The Craftsman, and Building and Dwelling. Sennett has advised the United Nations on urban issues for the past thirty years and currently serves as member of the UN Committee on Urban Initiatives. He is the Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and former University Professor of the Humanities at New York University.
RICHARD SENNETT
Oftentimes, we look at creative work as though the very creative process itself is something good, and we've got to break that habit. These are tools of expression, and like any tool, you can use them to damage something or to make something. I've been very mindful of even in the art I know best, which is classical music, that it can be turned to very malign purposes, for instance, in the operas of Wagner.
So I wanted to do this set of books, I want to show what is kind of the basic DNA that people use for good or for ill. What are the tools they use, if you like, of expression that they use in the creative process?
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You concentrate well on so many things, but really on this, as a stage. The cities as a stage for performance become a living work of art and broaden our conception of what performance is. We think about politics as being a performance, but also public protest as being a kind of choreography.
SENNETT
Well, you know, this is not an original idea to me. For a long time, ever since the Renaissance, people have thought about the design of cities as works of art. That's mostly about their imagery, their physical spaces, and so on. The notion that there are spaces where people are performing for each other in everyday life is more recent.
One comes out of Baudelaire in the 19th century, a little out of Balzac, and it asks a question, which I try to take up in my book: Sure, people are on display to each other all the time, and they're performing roles. What's special about performance once you go into a theater or a musical hall?
And that's not just a question about where you are; it's about what's happening. If you saw somebody doing batsu on the street, you might think, "Great," but you'd also think, "This is sort of weird." The moment you see somebody making those steps inside a theater, it becomes a whole different kind of expressive experience. But the moment you get into a concert hall, even somebody coughing in a classical concert can disturb you.
There is no art without craft, and there's a direct line in my brain between the book that I wrote on craftsmanship and the book on performance. The difference is that a lot of craftsmanship is self-referential.
So one of the issues about craft is, to come back to that, we have the performing arts where the limits on getting things absolutely right have to end because digitally, we can lie, whereas in craft, performing live is something in which the imperfections are built in. They're part of the expression. Even something like a memory slip, which in my old age, I'm now subject to. When you have a memory slip in a live performance, you've got to cover it over. Sometimes you do something quite interesting to cover over the fact you've forgotten what the score is. That's something that, say, a woodworker wouldn't want to do; they would want something that is absolutely what it is.
There's no artifice put over it; things aren't just good enough. The rightness is a kind of aspect of craftsmanship that gets in our way as performers. Anyhow, the other side of my book, which you mentioned briefly, is that I'm really interested in the relation between performance and ritual. Where do those two separate?
A prayer is a kind of performance, but we'd never call it artistic. It's collective; it's impersonal, pretty much. The same thing with singing a psalm or something like that. The idea of standing out personally is not something that's involved in ritual, whereas marking the artist's presence is something that happens in the non-ritualized domain of performance.
In this book, I try to talk about this in a scene. I don't know if you remember it in the AIDS hospital, where the priests want to give absolution to people who are dying of AIDS, but this group of professional performers wanted to perform instead. They didn't want absolution. They didn't want a ritual. They wanted something more alive, which was about them—they put on a performance of As You Like It in this hospital ward, which I describe in the book.
That's an instance of this other big thing I'm interested in, which is where does a mark of the creator come in, in non-ritualized kinds of performance? Of course, there are all kinds of rituals on stage. For instance, dressing up in those funny suits that we wear is a kind of Marxist sort of difference that you're not seeing somebody you just meet on the street. This is a special realm; it's true, it's a ritual, but it's to mark the presence that art is doing something special.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
And I also wonder, then you talk about religion, and I mean, I'm not particularly religious, but there is something that we lose by losing our connection with history and tradition, where we all knew the same songs, or we could all be familiar with the canon of literature or of works of art.
SENNETT
The problem is whether they are good or bad. You know, if you went to a Trump rally, that's a ritualized experience, and boy, is it theatrical. All of that acting out, and very cleverly acted out, is a way of arousing anger and indeed hatred with people about subjects that aren't named. In Britain, we use the term dog whistle, and every Trump performance is a dog whistle about race.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
He's really the entertainer president of our nightmares. I want to mention that we do have these collective sad experiences like that. I was kind of heartened during COVID that people were happy that we were all living through an experience that they don't remember the last time.
SENNETT
Well, I don't believe in any of that. I think that to deal with the climate crisis, we need to deal with climate change.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
We can't dance our way out of this.
SENNETT
It just seems to me it's a kind of dodge. It's not dancing your way out of water shortages. I mean, it's ridiculous.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I've read and followed your work, and I literally just finished reading this morning your fascinating work on performance. At one point, you raised the issue that power itself starts to become staged at a certain point, and therefore, one of your childhood dreams, if I may refer to 1963—a year to which you keep returning—has a particular weight for you in Manhattan or New York. You bring back what for me is fascinating: the idea that something happened in '63 where you saw high art and everydayness missing.
When I read through the rest of the essays, particularly your account of AIDS in New York, what you underline is a Catholic hospital that allows liberties that are almost unthinkable in other similar institutions in the city. You again come back to a problem of the relationship between individual liberty and social constraint. In the third part, you come to the idea of personal restraint and social restraint. In other words, the accumulation of what has been happening in terms of rhetoric—and I think it is rhetorical activity—from the time of what you describe as the Leni Riefenstahl film.
We have come to a point where we can look at a Hitler-like figure and imagine it as some kind of failed entertainment.
SENNETT
That's a very good way to put it. You raised a lot of issues. First, I would say about 1963, it's engraved in my mind because it was a moment in the performing arts in New York.
I think it is something that has a moral consequence for the performer, which is how to use this power of performance more modestly. How not to become a Trump-like figure, but to see one's ability to move others as something that has to be a point of personal reflection, since you can obviously do so much harm.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Politics indeed is a zone apart, where anything goes that the powerful decide can go.
SENNETT
Do you remember when Musk appeared in the White House with the chainsaw? Does that image recall? I saw it.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Yeah, I saw it. The double salutes as well, which was even the same thing.
SENNETT
The chainsaw was really interesting, because if you watch it closely, Trump's looking at him like, "Oh my God, this is another way to do this." This is a prop. What we're seeing today is more like a kind of Guatemalan dictatorship. You harm the judiciary, which doesn't know what to do. You disorient the legislators who don't know how to behave, and so on. You have a lot of chaos, and behind that chaos in public leaves you free to pursue, I think, the creation of more wealth and more power in private.
When you look at those Leni Riefenstahl films, for instance, Triumph of the Will or Olympia, they are real events that she accurately films. There's nothing mystifying about them. These are things that actually happened just the way they're shown on film. Whereas at these Trump rallies, they are pervaded by alternative facts. The films they show could be Disney films, or this kind of political version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I mean, I think we would have a more humane politics if we were willing to be bored more.
In the end, I think the notion of nostalgia for young people—that my time or Patrick's time was better than now—isn't going to serve them very well.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
These are such important insights. Thank you, Richard Sennett, for opening our minds to the performance that lies beneath art, life, and politics. By recognizing the life in the concrete, we can transform our relationships, and our cities can become creative, inspiring living works of art. Thank you for adding your voice to The Creative Process.
