In summer 2025 the Auerbach Institute is hosting the sociologist Andreas Reckwitz as a Distinguished Fellow. We would like to take this as an opportunity to hold a workshop on the relevance of the connection between praxeology, art, and labour. In the context of contemporary Western industrial societies undergoing a transformation into information, knowledge, and service-oriented societies under the influence of neoliberalism – a phenomenon that has been observed since the 1970s, but more notably with the rise of the New Economy and financial capitalism in the 2000s – the nexus between artistic and aesthetic practices and discourses, on the one hand, and postmodern forms of labor, on the other, has garnered significant attention from the fields of cultural and social science research. In particular, the “creativity dispositive” (“Kreativitätsdispositiv”) diagnosed by Reckwitz has received increased attention. It is no longer disputed that we are dealing with a comprehensive social and economic change as well as the reconfiguration of an entire field of discourse in which the creative sector and the “creative class” as well as the associated practices of immaterial labour are representative of an extensive paradigm shift. 

In the course of current developments in the field of artificial intelligence, it is precisely this creative sector and the various areas of “intellectual” labour associated with it whose practices and working methods are being fundamentally called into question and may become completely obsolete in the future. This is currently leading to the reactivation of a topos that has been common since industrialization: the substitution of humans by machines. From this perspective, “computational creativity” primarily presents itself as a threat to a specifically human ability. It is interesting that the concept of creativity used here almost completely disregards earlier analyses of the concept. Instead of taking into account the fact that the concept of creativity is a concept that has long since not only shaped art production but has become an imperative in almost all “capitalizable” forms of work and areas of life, the debate – explicitly or implicitly – ties in with ideas of individual artistry and the associated ideas of autonomy, self-realization, and freedom.

The workshop would like to start here and put the praxeological and discourse-analytical findings on the role of creativity to the test. What implications does the current development in the field of AI have for our understanding of creativity as a social and economic dispositive? Are new forms of subjectivation emerging? What can praxeological approaches contribute to update their diagnoses without losing the complexity already achieved?

Time & Location: Library Erich Auerbach Institute (3rd floor), Weyertal 59 (back building), 50937 Cologne | 
May 20, 2025, 9.30 am-5 pm

 

With contributions by

Andreas Reckwitz – Pola Groß – Liat Grayver – Martin Jörg Schäfer – Sabeth Buchmann – Simon Roloff