3. The Ethics of Emergent Creativity: Can We Move Beyond Writing as Human Enterprise, Commodity and Innovation?

This contribution explores whether we can foreground a different vision of creativity and from there a reconfigured ethics of writing that is less focused on objects, outcomes, and ownership and more on messy, processual and relational notions of creativity as becoming. It argues from a feminist new materialist position that the current discourse on creativity is a material expression of creativity rather than merely its representation, and shows how this discourse has been defining, classifying, constructing, and situating creativity within a neoliberal framework of ‘creative industries’. Opening up from this discourse and the way we perform it through our writing practices might therefore enable us to explore extended relationalities of creativity, open-ended publishing processes, and a feminist ethics of care and responsibility. Alongside this reconfigured discourse this contribution will explore various entangled writing and publishing practices, from ‘uncreative writing’, to piracy and radical open access publishing in academia. How are these experimental, hybrid and posthuman writing practices intervening in the established discourse on creativity, and how can we through them start to performatively explore a new discourse and reconfigure the relationships that underlie our writing processes?