

Socialization is creative because creativity is social
pp. 146-158
in: , Style, politics and the future of philosophy, Berlin, Springer, 1989Abstract
Nearly everything about the approach to creativity and socialization based upon positing a strict dichotomy between them is misconceived. The mode of questioning, deployment of examples and comparative procedures systematically insure that such an approach will distort precisely what it seeks to clarify. Thus it is not that there are no genuine problems, tensions and paradoxes surrounding creativity and socialization in the social research context; but that the dichotomizing approach is far too abstract to illuminate those problems, tensions and paradoxes. The reasons why this should be so are, nevertheless, far from uninteresting. This is because they are bound up with central issues relating to the ways in which language and action are interwoven.