Autopoetic View on Creativity: Implications for Social Theory
Autopoetic View on Creativity: Implications for Social Theory

Summary/Abstract: Two contrasting theoretical strategies, from phenomenological and from structural sociology, tend to accentuate either the freedom of human agent or the constraining effects of social structure, thus creating unacceptable theoretical disbalance. One of the most promising attempts to overcome theoretical impasse is undertaken by A. Giddens in his Structuration theory, where he emphasizes social structure’s potential for both constraining and enabling human creativity. The ambition of this paper is to develop further the structuration perspective in terms of co-evolving ratios between “True Self” and “False Self” activities, on the one hand, and between structuration processes of Sociality and Socialization, on the other. Its main objective is to demonstrate the ability of the autopoietic-systems-theory-based understanding of creativity to cast new light on how the human agent is both “conditioned” by and manipulating different (enabling and constraining) aspects of social structure.

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