The Creative Process: An Ethnographic Analysis

This fascinating and highly readable book, illustrated with many drawings by the author, uses semiotics, psychoanalytic theory, Marxist theory, and sociological theory to analyze creativity. It also includes short inserts by a communications scholar, a psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst, a semiotician, a humor scholar, and a media scholar offering their perspectives on the subject. The book relates creativity to humor, deals with the way Freud’s and Marx’s ideas can be applied to humor, and discusses many aspects of everyday life such as smart speakers, TikTok, hairstyles, bagels, and personal taste. It argues that creativity is not limited to a small number of people in the arts, but that everyone is, to varying degrees, creative. An unusual feature of the book is that it offers notes from the author’s journal to show his thinking processes in writing the book.