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understanding involves identifying how value is generated within a social system
(Csikszentmihalyi
1996
). I will expand this point with reference to relevant per-
spectives in the social sciences, as it is an important prerequisite for considering
how social systems and individuals can be generatively and adaptively creative.
14.3.1 The Creativity of Social Systems Is More than the Sum
of Individual Creative Acts
Our creative capabilities are contingent on the objects and infrastructure available
to us, which help us achieve individual goals. One way to look at this is, as Clark
(
2003
) does, in terms of the mind being
extended
to a distributed system with an
embodied brain at the centre, and surrounded by various other tools, from digits
to digital computers. We can even step away from the centrality of human brains
altogether and consider social complexes as distributed systems involving more or
less cognitive elements. Latour (
1993
) considers various such complexes as
actor
networks
, arguing that what we think of as agency needs to be a flexible concept, as
applicable to such networks as to individuals under the right circumstances.
Gell (
1998
), proposing an anthropology of art, likewise steps away from the cen-
trality of human action by designating primary and secondary forms of agency. Arte-
facts are clearly not agents in the sense that people are, that is,
primary agents
,but
they can be granted a form of agency,
secondary agency
, to account for the ef-
fect they have on people in interaction. Gell argues that we need this category of
secondary agency, which at first seems counterintuitive, in order to fully account for
the networks of interaction that underpin systems of art. Artworks, he argues, abduct
agency from their makers, extended to new social interactions where they must nec-
essarily be understood as independent. This idea of art as an extension of influence
beyond the direct action of the individual is also emphasised by Coe (
2003
)askey
to understanding the extent of kin-group cohesion in human societies: by extending
influence through time, such as through decorative styles, an ancestor can establish
strong ties between larger groups of descendants than otherwise would be possible.
It is hard to be precise about exactly what is meant by artworks and artefacts here.
For example, decorative styles are in a sense just concepts, in that they can only be
reproduced through individual cognition, and the same is true of artefacts if they
are to be reproduced and modified in continued lineages (Sperber
2000
)—a situa-
tion that would radically change with self-reproducing machines. But artefacts are
concepts built around a physical realisation, which is itself a carrier for the concept.
That is, objects participate in the collective process of remembering and learning
that allow a culture to persevere and evolve over time.
Artworks can take on a slightly different status. They are typically defined as
unreproducable, even if they are effectively reproduced in many ways (Gell
1998
).
Like many other artefacts involved in social interaction, such as telephones and so-
cial networking tools, they act to shape a distributed creative process. These may
be the products of individual human invention, but they do not simply get added to
