The Dilemmas of Cultural Innovation

Abstract

Innovation does not coincide with discovery. Discovery may play a key role in the process of innovation, opening new horizons and possibilities for human activity, but it is possible to speak of innovation only when a change is accepted by a community and transforms its shared praxis. Within the phenomenological variety of innovation, it is not easy to distinguish real from more ephemeral cultural changes. This paper does not intend to review the phenomenology of cultural innovation, but to put forward an observation of cultural change according to three pairs of apparently extreme and contrary terms: technology and thought, tradition and innovation, subject and collectivity. The paper suggests, in fact, that innovation is generated by the ceaselessly different and original combinations of these dimensions.