| d.garcia on Thu, 26 Feb 2015 13:35:27 +0100 (CET) |
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| <nettime> Reframing the Creative Question |
Notes Towards a Reframing of the Creative Question Full article with links + Images at: http://new-tactical-research.co.uk/ In these notes I will argue that critical thinkers who are usually hostile to "Creative Industries" rhetoric should be prepared to take the risk of contamination by engaging with this discourse on its own terms. As it is my contention is that there is something like a radical revisionist version of this narrative to be uncovered. And I would further argue that the purpose of this act of recuperation is that it offers an important component in answering the most urgent and difficult question of all: how do we make the vital transition to a zero or low growth economy? General Purpose Creativity (GPC) Recently Warwick University published a detailed report; Enriching Britain, Creativity, Culture, Growth, 1. at the same time as the launch of the BBC's extensive -Get Creative Campaign-2. both of these projects coincided with the leader of the UK Labor Party Ed Milliband's introduction of the Creative and Cultural Industries theme into Labor's pre-election campaigning. Taken together these initiatives signify a return of the so called Creative and Cultural industries, if not exactly to centre Stage, then at least, (as Chris Smith one of the architects of the original project declared ) -as a mainstream concern of government- and part of the -Darwinian struggle for money and influence in Whitehall-. All of which make it an opportune moment for a pragmatic review of the Creative Question. Not only in order to understand what has changed but also to ask whether anything has been learned by the political class in the decades that have elapsed since New Labor introduced the meme into mainstream British party politics. MBAs in Art Schools? An all to familiar error goes largely un-challenged in public discourse on this topic, the tendency to elide the term creativity with the arts as though the two were interchangeable. The facts on the ground tell a very different story, revealing an inflationary expansion of the notion of creativity that goes far beyond mere instrumentalisation of the Arts. Since the 90s the creativity meme has proliferated to become an obligatory component of a political economy in which continuous innovation is an inescapable response to accelerating commodity cycles. To take just one of the many symptoms, something is clearly afoot, when a famous school of art and design Central St Martins in London is proposing to start, of all things, an MBA - an MBA centered on "organisational creativity and innovation".3. The 'Creative' a New Professional Category However audacious the decision to situate an MBA in a college of art and Design appears, it should not be seen as a particularly strange or surprising development. Rather it can be seen as a logical consequence of the continued currency of the creative industries meme in conjunction with the fact that for more than two decades courses of media art and design are no longer locked into single media crafts; e.g. painting, sculpture, film, graphic design, or web design etc. At all levels (and including Fine Art) we have seen the emergence of courses that cater for an employment landscape made up of networks of interdisciplinary General Purpose Creativity companies. Frequently using digital media as a catalyst for cross platform hybridity. The general acceptance of this kind of creative hybridity is reflected in the currency of a term designating a new kind of professional: the -Creative- a term that, these days, frequently displaces -artist or designer-4 Feeding the Creative Economy For a decade or more wave after wave of students are emerging from these digitally inflected hybrid media arts courses which are typically made up of a highly specific constellation of disciplines which is more specific than mere interdisciplinarity, and more widely applicable. "It is a distinct form of collaboration that combines art, technology and communications/marketing with particular emphasis on data mining and development simultaneous relationships between a variety of media and social media platforms". These courses are giving rise to generations of graduates, who, for better or for worse, have been educated to expect a new kind of participatory economy, requiring enhanced levels of mastery, connectivity and personal autonomy. It is generally known as the -creative economy- and is founded, above all, on the principal of continuous renewal and innovation. What is at Stake ? Despite the numerous ways in which these youthful expectations have been betrayed through both ingenious and crude forms of exploitation and self exploitation, not to mention an accumulating rubble of mind numbing management speak. I want to argue that we must be prepared to take the risk of engaging with Creative Industry discourse on its own terms. As It is my contention that there is something like a radical revisionist version of this narrative to be uncovered. And I would further argue that its worth the risk of contamination as such an act of recuperation might offer an important component in answering the most urgent and difficult question of all: how do we make the vital transition to a zero or low growth economy? Real Artists Ship It was Steve Jobs who perhaps inadvertently offers the best definition of the creative industries with three short words: "real artists ship". Uttering these words made it abundantly clear, that from the outset (and despite appearances) Apple's destination was never going to be Bohemia. On the contrary it was his ruthless capacity to translate a highly specific and ultimately monopolistic vision of creativity for all (everyone is a creative if they -Think Different-) into mass market commodities, that made the world sit up and listen when Jobs later declared that for Apple: technology was not enough - he famously expanded his vision of the fusion the creative arts and computation by declaring that- its technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yield the results that make our hearts sing-. However cheesy this sounds to critically trained ears, it was the successful marketing of this euphoric pop narrative that finally consigned CP Snow's influential two-culture stand-off between the arts and the sciences into the dustbin of history; inaugurating the era in which the post war cybernetic paradigm came out of the shadows into the spotlight of popular culture. The 15 hour week Sociologist and activist David Graeber recently provided a valuable perspective on the transition to zero or low growth. In his short, influential essay -On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs-5 he describes the contemporary economy as made up of a large proportion of the population doing meaningless tasks they hate; "bullshit jobs". He suggests that these jobs are an artifice -they are fake, made up jobs- designed to keep a certain class of worker too busy to question the status quo. Its a kind of neo-liberal re-boot on the old protestant homily that - the devil makes work for idle hands-. Although the conspiracy theory behind the essay might be questionable its starting point has a bearing in our discussion here as Graeber begins his essay by reminding us that In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently so that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour working week. Graeber insists that -There's every reason to believe that Keynes was right as in technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet, he continues, -it didn't happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more-. His observation is a reminder that insatiable growth is an addiction, and that we already have the means at our disposal to transit to an entirely different kind of economy. Further on I want to suggest that some surprising data from recent Brighton Fuse research program, suggests that many in the digital creative free-lance Community could be seen as outliers for the emergence of a new political economy. Time for a Change of Tone Last November Amsterdam's Institute of Network Cultures 6. made a timely return to the theme of the Creative Economy approximately eight years after its original and ground breaking conference -My Creativity-. This time, tweaking the title into My Creativity Sweatshops. It is noteworthy that INC thought it was worth reprising the Creative Industries meme, albeit accompanied by the predictable dose of critical probing. This interrogation initially took the form of the text, Nine Theses on the Creative Question, 7. (Lovink. Rossiter and Olmer) which begins in Thesis 1, by characterising the Creative Industries as -a creepy discourse, far removed the version of creativity is from radical invention and social transformation. Could it be that much as we need to compose critical melodies we need to do so in a less predictable key ? Particularly as the very act of reviving the meme on this scale could actually be seen as a complement, a tribute to the remarkable staying power and continued currency of the creative industries concept. Decades after its conception this discourse is still able to mobilize theoretical and policy debates at the highest level as well as determining the allocation of significant research and development resources. I would like to argue that the reason that critical thinkers return again and again to the concept is the lingering suspicion that the concept retains radical surplus that has been overlooked. After so many decades critique is not enough, as the hidden potential may only be uncovered if, as I stated at the outset, we are prepared to risk engaging with this discourse on its own terms. Competition; not the Only Fruit In the third of the Nine Theses describe the 'economy of abundance' as a phantom, that requires purging by a Piketty for the internet age. The authors go on to make an urgent plea for a better understanding of how 'extreme inequality' translates into digital culture. Agreed but rather than Piketty, I would advocate that to better understand the dynamics one might risk a picnic with the Devil, by dipping into the primer "Zero to One: 8. by the shameless uber capitalist Peter Thiel, co-founder of Pay-Pal, the (truly creepy) Singularity University, as well as being the first outside investor in Face Book. Zero to One is refreshingly candid, quickly dispensing with the usual legitimizing neo-liberal nostrums of the -invisible hand- and -wisdom of crowds expressed through a free market-. Instead Thiel argues strongly against any thought of entering the brawl of free market competition. This he insists is to be avoided at all costs as the true goal of every startup must be to become a monopoly, a company so dominant in its technological arena that it can give investors enormous financial returns with cash to spare for the intensive R&D that can ensure its long-term viability. Indeed he begins by quoting the famous opening lines of "Anna Karenina": "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." But he declares " Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: Each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: They failed to escape competition. We to can deploy Thiel's critique of the unquestioning benefits of competition into the public sphere where not only education and health but also transportation, energy and banking -- might also question the benefits market competition (or its equivalent the internal market) which is continuously promoted as an unalloyed good. Cultural Capital and Beyond- Another concrete reasons why reprising the Creative Industries question Is historical perspective afforded by the passage of time. The arrival of Creative Capital the book by Robert Hewison9. (the My Creativity conference key-note) a longstanding commentator close to the genesis of the concept. In Creative Capital he provides an extremely valuable retrospective analysis of the origins and political dynamics that gave rise to Creative Industries as a political phenomenon. The book is strong on the ways in which New Labor imbibed a radical cultural studies agenda from an academic context and translated by policy wonks such as Mullgan and Leadbeater into a more expansive and inclusive conception of what constitutes culture. And once free from the financial strictures of the early years and under the stewardship the minister, Chris Smith, the arts finally entered a period where, in Smith's Words, they "came of age as a mainstream concern of government and joined the Darwinian struggle for money and influence in Whitehall". The review of New Labor's vision for the role of culture, whatever its shortcomings, nevertheless highlights the shallow and reactive nature of the current Labor party's engagement with the subject. The book carefully weighs the evidence examining in detail what Hewison concludes was in the end a Faustian bargain for culture in accepting the New Labor billions. Interestingly the moment the bargain was struck can be traced back to the moment when Blair literally changes the script .. when about to address the key gathering arranged by Murdoch, on the eve of the speech Blaire forces a re-write on the section of the speech dealing with the Arts to highlight the economic benefits of the agenda. --Its an early sign that New Labor would always, as Stuart Hall was to write, be "operating on a terrain defined by Thatcherism". Affective Labor, and the Computational Avant Garde Although informative, a vital element is missing from Creative Capital, an account the relationship between the transformation of culture and the emergence of a new technological paradigm. A paradigm that would ultimately propel the figure of the consumer to center stage, displacing the worker, or rather merging these two figures into into what "Hardt and Negri characterised as "affective labor," subsuming old-style industrial production together with much else. 10 Moreover the very structure of computational media is "avant-garde" - A fact related to the attribute Self Expansion, an attribute described by Castells whereby computers are the basis for constructing new computers and the more powerful they become the more complex the technologies that can be built using them. This self accelerating cycle is best captured by Moores Law. 11 Lev Manovich described in Software Takes Command 12. how computational media's avant garde structure, is giving rise to a situation in which the role of the media avant-garde is no longer performed exclusively by individual artists in their studios but instead by a variety of players, from very big to very small -- from companies to independent programmers, hackers and designers. - The dialectical relationship between new styles of production, the rise of affective labor and the emergence of new social movements are yet to be theorised in ways that will help us as to locate the agents of progressive change in a control society. 13. The Free-lance Economy In the coming section the statistical data and some of the analysis is drawn exclusively from the second Brighton Fuse report. Both reports can be Downloaded in full from the Brighton Fuse site. One of the most obvious deficits in the claims and counter claims made for the Creative Industries is a lack of research informed by data sets large enough and broad enough to take us beyond speculation. In this regard, Brighton Fuse, a major 2-3 year research project funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council, represents an important step forward, delivering one of the most detailed pieces of analysis of any industry undertaken in the UK. The focus is entirely on what the authors characterise as (CDIT) or Creative Digital & IT companies and has two phases the first focused on the ecology of small and medium size companies an (average of 7 employees) that make up the most significant part of Brighton's new media ecology. The research is based on a sample of 500 firms and 77 detailed interviews. The second phase (the report has just been published) examines the free lance economy and drew on a survey of 334 free-lance Workers drawn from a pool. Although we might disagree with the conclusions of these reports and question some of the methodologies behind the sampling procedures there is still a great deal to be mined from the Data that has been gathered. I will however restrict myself here to the most recently Published report that examined the free lance economy. The first of the Brighton Fuse reports (2013) already highlighted the scale and importance of the free-lancers contribution. 80% of firms in the sample worked with freelancers with the average firm working with more than 7 freelancers. Interestingly these same firms had an average of 7 full time employees. The growth of self employment since the recession is often characterised in wholly negative terms, as part of the precariat. A groundswell perception has taken root of the self employment as a low paid residue that is left after the essential workforce has been identified.- The perception is accompanied by the general suspicion the self-employed are struggling to keep up appearances with occasional odd jobs, and would prefer the security of a 'real job'. This narrative, however is not supported by the findings of the Brighton Fuse research. To begin with the research indicates that free lancers are well paid. Frequently better paid than their counterparts in formal employment. The research points to an average income of free-lancers in Brighton as £31. 137 and the median income asÂ27. 000 [this level was being earned by 50% Of the respondents]. To account for the fact that the respondents varied in the amount of time they devoted to free-lance activities, the researchers provide a normalised full time equivalent figure. In other words a projection of their income as if they were working full time of £ 58.107. And the median is£?42.857. These figures show that freelancers in Brighton are actually earning very well in comparison with the national average of both employees an free lancer. In terms of growth rate the annual earnings of free-lancers Increased by 7.3% between 2012 and 2013 with a median growth of 2.8. This is remarkable when you consider that the average growth for full time employees in the same period throughout the UK is 2.1%. However behind these figures are some facts and qualitative data that is even more revealing than the earnings data alone and bring us back to the discussion around the way in which the rewards of a certain kinds of relatively autonomous dis- alienated labor might point towards a community of outliers developing a different kind of political economy. The Brighton Fuse research highlights the fact that among this community the fulfillment of personal aspirations was by far the most prominent reason for the freelance lifestyle choice. Many of the interviews emphasized the importance of flexibility and possibility of realizing specific business ideas were deemed as important motivations by about 87% of respondents. This flexibility seems to be important not just to people freelancing as a secondary job, but especially to those doing it as a primary and full-time activity. As well as the aspiration to develop personal business ideas, or to achieve more flexibility and autonomy in their lives. Many of the respondents invest their time in side-projects alongside their freelance work, some of which are intended for future monetisation such as products, others are the individual equivalent of R&D, and still others are passion-projects, often for artistic or philanthropic purposes. Some simply find the autonomy of freelancing more convenient to manage family life. Almost 40% of freelancers are involved in voluntary or unpaid work, dedicating about 5% of their working time to it. The possibility of taking some time off work to engage in these altruistic activities is another side of freelancing that is hard to measure using approaches based on conventional economic incentives. It may be that freelancers are using their distinctive skills that they trade in working life, for these pro bono tasks.9. "Finally, about one third of the report?s respondents devote part of their working time, about 10% on average, to other non-specified activities. When enquiring about such activities during the interviews, typical answers included childcare, caring for someone else, producing artworks, or working in a studio space." "Only a small minority freelance through necessity, although many more do so to earn higher pay." Networks Without Solidarity Although the Brighton Fuse data may hold some indicative significance but this fortunate group of free-lancers can at best be regarded as outliers whose advantages are yet to be felt by precarious labor at the sharp end of the great recession. in the wider economy. What these and similar reports lack is anything that equates to the emergence of new forms of solidarity. Certainly nothing that equates to the leverage of traditional forms of Solidarity. Felix Stalder addresses this lack through a stimulating short book on Digital Solidarity, but as yet the original source of solidarity's power of industrial leverage with which the labor movement of the mid-19th to mid-20th century was able to exert its collective will over capital. In this sense labor power not only represented and protected its workers it also created a spectrum of political parties transforming the political mainstream until its achievements began to be rolled back In the 1980s. As Castells pointed out in a discussion with Paul Mason at LSE in 2012 that "It took 20-30 years from the arrival of mass industrialization to the point when the union power and the labor movement became part of political institutions"[...]. "It is a long journey from the minds of people to the institutions of society." Castells may be correct but in the era of the triple Crunch, the credit, climate and the inequality crunch surely means that we no longer have the luxury of time. The journey to a new regimes capable of organising networks of precarious affective labor into new political formations capable of exerting leverage may have started but It urgently needs to accelerate. Patience is not always a virtue. ----------------------------------- 1. Warwick University Enriching Britain, Creativity, Culture, Growth http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/research/warwickcommission/futureculture/finalrepo rt/ Robert Hewison Creative Capital 2. Get Creative- BBC, http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/sections/get-creative 3.CSM MBA, http://www.arts.ac.uk/csm/courses/postgraduate/mba-proposed-course/ 4. Bournemouth University -- Media Arts Practice http://courses.bournemouth.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate-degree/media-arts-prac tice/none/4963/ 5. David Graeber, On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs - http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ 6. My Creativity Sweatshops- http://networkcultures.org/mycreativity/ 7. G. Lovink, N. Rossiter, Olmer - 9 Theses -- On the Creative Question http://networkcultures.org/mycreativity/2014/11/19/on-the-creative-question-manifest-by-geert-lovink-sebastian-olma-ned-rossiter/ 8. Peter Thiel , Zero to One -Crown Business, New York, 2014 http://zerotoonebook.com/ 9. Robert Hewison, Creative Capital, The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain, Verso, 2014 10. Felix Stalder Manuell Castells- The Network and the Theory of the Network Society, Polity 2006 http://felix.openflows.com/html/castells_polity.html 11. Steven Shavero's Blog -- The Pinnocchio Theory -- Blog entry title: A Mcluhanite Marxism? Posted Monday, April 17th, 2006 12. Lev Manovich -- Software Takes Command, Bloomsbury Academic, 3013 13. Brian Holmes in conversation at -Tactical Media Connections Meeting- Tolhuistuin, Amsterdam 2013 14. Brighton Fuse Reports 1&2 2013-2015 http://www.brightonfuse.com/ 15. Felix Stalder. Digital Solidarity, 2013, Mute http://www.metamute.org/editorial/books/digital-solidarity On 25 Feb 2015, at 19:01, nettime mod squad wrote: ------------------------ d a v i d g a r c i a new-tactical-research.co.uk
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