The question of talent in the arts and creative industries (2)

If we follow Wittkower [10], it was literary theorists who developed the new aesthetic semantics of originality. The impetus came from the considerable break introduced by Shakespeare's theater, which could no longer be subsumed under the aesthetics of imitation. The large number of writings devoted to Shakespeare is considered to have been the crucible of this new alliance between the values of genius and originality. In 1715, Alexander Pope, in the Preface to his edition of Shakespeare's works, wrote that "if ever an author deserved to be called original, it is Shakespeare". Edward Young, Willam Duff and Robert Wood went on to produce books dedicated to the genius's originality, right from their titles. Edward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) was the most influential: "Simian imitation destroys all mental individuality", he wrote. The legal distinction between originality and novelty, which was to become famous in literary property law, yet is rather tricky to handle, echoes this mark of individuality. Originality, a subjective criterion or subjective appreciation, is defined as the mark of the author's personality on his or her work. Novelty, deemed an objective criterion, is the production of a work or knowledge with no previous equivalent. The two notions are linked, since the law deems novelty to be a good practical indicator of originality. But they are distinct: a French translation of a Russian novel is not a new work, since the translation must faithfully reproduce the original work, but the fact that it bears the imprint of the translator's choices, which cannot be deduced from a translation algorithm, makes it original. Originality, as a legal category, joins the aesthetic definition of the 18th^century , centered on the individualization of the creative contribution.

One of the interests of Young's doctrine is the naturalistic inspiration of his characterization of originality. An original creation is akin to a vegetal process: it arises spontaneously from the vital root of genius, it grows, it is not manufactured. This vegetal concept of genius [11] later inspired the assimilation of the most original part of creative activity to an unconscious process.

In my investigation of inequality within equality, I mentioned that nature could be invoked against the rigid social order of the Ancien Régime, which is rooted in a pure system of arbitrary conventions, those of a fixed, class-separating social stratification. But what exactly does this mean? Instead of a fixed hierarchy of beings, the Enlightenment episteme is that of the ubiquity of change and development, of becoming. All theories of the organic perfection of civilization under the triple action of equality, the sociability of mutual esteem, and the sharing of knowledge through education, are based on a philosophy of becoming and progress, pessimistic in Rousseau, optimistic in the Encyclopedists. The very conception of historical dynamics borrowed its models from organic and natural analogies, with organic growth (Herder), dialectical development and cyclical processes. As Leonard Meyer [12] writes, history had to be rescued from arbitrariness and chance, to become the study of necessary change, for which natural evolution provides a model.

As Meyer points out, we should note the gradualist and continuous nature of the model of change called for by this natural, vegetal metaphor of the transformation and becoming of individuals and societies. That change is seen as an intrinsic property of nature and culture, and as such can be promoted as an ideal of emancipation also means, a contrario, that this model is not open to radical revolutions and ruptures. The model of inequality within equality is a model of egalitarian elitism: gradual and slow, but continuous change, and oriented in a well-assured direction (the abolition of birthright privileges), characterizes a liberal model promoted by an emancipating elite. The substitution of differences in degree (levels of achievement and wealth) for differences in assigned and inherited social rank is the matrix of a legitimizable hierarchy. As Rosanvallon points out, the doctrine that derives from this can lead to the de-socialization of situational inequalities, concealing the social origin of the facts of social reproduction observed in a regime of formal equality, by housing them in a graduated distribution of conditions and a hierarchy of talents. Inequalities are then attributed to the activation of abilities whose origin is not questioned, and whose implementation is placed under the sole responsibility of the individual. In this picture, talent and genius can be handled as egalitarian notions, according to the already stated principle of their double-sided identity: opposing the strength of intrinsic qualities to the arbitrariness of assignment to an order and a class by virtue of birth, but also helping to justify new hierarchies.

[10] Rudolf Wittkower, "Genius: individualism in art and artists", in Philip P. Wiener (ed.), The Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973-1974.

[11] See Meyer H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, London, Oxford University Press, 1953.

[12] Leonard B. Meyer, Style and Music, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989, p. 166 ff.