Against lists: a post-manifesto for a wild, ecological creativity

We begin with the idea that creativity has its own life and agency. While this statement about creativity isn’t controversial, approaches to creativity that seek to account for, measure and in many cases tame this life and agency abound (Harris, 2014). So, we begin again: creativity has its own life and agency and because of this, must be liberated from the cage of use-value and released back into the wild. We must re-wild creativity not out of human self-interest, but by recognizing the force and potentiality of its own wild agency. By extending the principles of creative agency (Harris, 2021), in this chapter we argue that not all material, processual, and relational activities can or should be apprehended, and that the pervasive obsession with doing so is a form of neo-colonialism. That attempts to assess, measure, and rank creativity are an extension of a global culture of commodification and are, we assert, misplaced and ill-informed; further, that these strategies are imprecise, instead measuring something related to without getting close to creativity. In the wake of efforts to capture and domesticate creativity, creative wilding (Harris & Holman Jones, in press) focuses our attentions on the unbounded and unpredictable potential that stands in opposition to “modernity’s orderly impulses” (Halberstam, 2020, p. x).