CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE

I’m about to start the second unit of my Creativity and Capitalism course at Parsons which will focus on ritual and play as the paths to understanding the existential and the deep meaning of cultures.

For the business folks, we will focus on Branding and how the successful brand succeeds in mining the existential–how it succeeds in understanding and representing what is meaningful to the culture of its audience. 

Its not about satisfying needs or even wants. A great brand speaks to the higher order desires of people. No focus group or marketing research can get to these higher order desires of people because they are usually tacit and unexpressed–yet real and meaningful.

So we read the following together and talk about stuff:

Readings Unit Two:

for March 18:
Lewis Hyde “The Bones of the Dead” from The Gift
David Foster Wallace “Federer as Religious Experience”

following, in yet-to-be-determined order:

Dreyfus and Kelly, “Our Contemporary Nihilism” from All Things Shining
Dreyfus, “Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology and Politics”
Barthes, Selections from Mythologies
Cowbird, especially the Pine Ridge Community Storytelling Project
to be read in prep for April 1st (Annie Correal guest)
Vygotsky, “The Role of Play in Development”