Abstract

A creation regime is characterized by a reciprocal relationship between the ability to be creative, i. e. to produce new concepts, and the ability to create, i. e. to produce valuable new objects and social relations. Any creation regime must therefore be understood both as a cognitive regime and as a regime of technical concretization and psychosocial construction. It is historically circumscribed and the conditions for its exercise are not always met. In the 1990’, Boris Groys has proposed, in the domain of art, to define innovation as transvaluation: the integration of profane items as valuable pieces of art into the Archive. According to Groys, the goal was not anymore to create a new paradigm for the future but to let a trace of an historical stage of a tradition defined by the constant research of new values. But since the “Archive” is no more a collection of material collections in institutions, but mainly an enormous stock of images, texts and sounds in the clouds, and since everything new is not only replaced by something newer but confronted with everything in the digital Archive, the elementary representations of evolution cannot emerge unscathed. When everyone is innovating to overcome the present and the digital Archive is keeping memory of every attempt to do so, no one knows how to define “contemporary” other than by relating it to innovations from other fields, and this incessant renewal undermines any reference to thinking about the future. That is why we choose the term “super-contemporaneity” to designate a conceptual overcoming of the notion of contemporaneity that no longer operates on the model of a linear historical evolution, according to which the claim of contemporaneity is constructed in relation to the past.