‘Everyone is Creative’. Artists as Pioneers of the New Economy?
Individualisation is a strategy of government which in the context of the culture industries breathes fresh life into what had become a redundant modernist conception of individual creativity as an inner force waiting to be unleashed. Thus sweeping aside writing and scholarship on the social and collective bases of creative production the Green Paper (der britischen ”New Labour”-Regierung vom (?) April 2001) titled ”Culture and Creativity The Next Ten Years” seeks instead to resurrect a traditional notion of tapping into talent. The source of such talent is of course ‘the individual’ who if provided with the right kind of support can then be best left alone to his or her own devices to explore personal creativity unhindered by bureaucracy and red tape. Interestingly in the Green Paper it is children and young people, indeed babies, who are the focus of attention. This indicates how the workforce of the future is to be envisaged. The paper opens with the words ‘Everyone is creative’ and the thinking expressed in this Paper is to further extend access to the arts and culture for producers and consumers alike with particular emphasis on those who in the past considered these fields as ‘not for them’. Thus the encouragement to the socially disadvantaged to develop their own creative capacities has a double purpose, to increase the employability of future generations including those from low income backgrounds by channelling creative talent in the direction of economic activity and at the same time to effect the transition from the mass worker to the individual freelance. Apart from the acknowledged socially valuable role of the arts and culture it is the possible contribution to economic growth which underpins these proposals for the reason that the culture industries are, the paper claims, ‘expanding at a rate of 16% per annum’.
The growth referred to was almost entirely the result of the expansion in software and computer services, which was also the location for the rise of almost 135,000 jobs from 1998. However the small print reveals this figure to include ‘employees, the self employed unpaid family workers and people on government training schemes’. Looking at the fashion sector (which is well within my own expertise) we find that 75% of companies have turnovers of less £1m. (Which according to my own study means that designers themselves are often surviving on less than £20,000 a year (McRobbie 1998)). And that the 200 or so companies in existence at any one time might well not exist in 5 years time, but despite this the headlines to the section announce that UK fashion designer sector is the fourth biggest in the world. (There is a huge disparity between revenues for fashion in Italy, France and the US and those in the UK). Experts in other sectors could likewise go through the figures and the prose and what would emerge I would argue is a conclusion that no matter how important the culture industries are for growth, this is a sector with low capital returns and while employment, in particular self employment, may be buoyant it is also a low pay sector (‘poor in work’). Finally it is also as volatile and as vulnerable to the moves of multi-national capital as many more traditional fields eg garment manufacturing.
Having said that we are currently presented with the full accomplishment of the neo-liberalisation of the UK cultural economy, the question is what does this mean? There is another question. How can the relentless process of individualisation in the world of cultural work be kept apart from the seeming inevitability of local and global neo-liberalism and be re-directed as a force for re-vitalising the democratising process? Can it put these anti-social forces into retreat?
It is in the field of the cultural and creative industries that we find the fullest expression of an ‘ideal local labour market’ from the viewpoint of a New Labour government committed to full employment, to freeing individuals from dependency on state subsidies, to creating a thriving entrepreneurial culture and to a new work ethic of self responsibility. This requires not a labour market as such, more a network of creative persons for whom jobs or projects are negotiated like actors going to audition for a ‘part’. Thus we find a curious scenario of a centre-left government whose priority it is to perform a double act of neo-liberalisation, first to minimise social welfare support for those unable to earn a living wage (so that earnings now become multi-sourced, with creatives holding down two or three jobs at once), and second to set individuals to their own devices in terms of job creation so that the large corporations are less burdened by the responsibilities of a workforce. The answer to so many problems across a wide spectrum of the population eg mothers at home and not quite ready to go back to work full time on the part of New Labour is, ‘self employment’, set up your own business, be free to do your own thing. Live and work like an artist. And creative work is particularly appealing to youth because of the emphasis on uncovering talent, because of their proximity to the kinds of fields flagged up as already successful ie popular music, film, art, writing, acting, fashion, graphic design and so on. Sharon Zukin wrote in the 1980s about how the rise of loft living in New York’s former manufacturing neighbourhoods came about when artist-living spaces became a model for urban middle class lifestyle (Zukin 1988). We can now extend this to suggest that artist’s ways of earning a living becomes a model for livelihoods as well as lifestyle, this is the logic of ‘everyone is creative’.
The Inequities of the Informal, The Cruelties of Cool
To work in the sectors I have so far described requires endurance and stamina. A good deal of time and energy must be invested in activities for which there is absolutely no reliable return. Fund-raising for sponsorship to buy new equipment, organising meetings to discuss possible partnerships, simply ‘keeping in touch’ with the network all require time and money. Often these activities take place in the guise of something entirely different, attending a launch party or an event at an arts or cultural centre. The energy and investment of time in these cultural forms of job creation mark a rupture with older notions of ‘work’, ‘job’ ‘career’. But these give rise to new inequities. As a series of studies carried out in Glasgow have shown these fields of work and other associated areas including the new bar and restaurant business are also fields of ‘aesthetic labour’, employing according to the right look, the right body shape, even the right accent (Warhurst et al. 2000). Age constraints are in operation. Hidden variables of class and cultural capital also have an effect, the young single mother for example is less likely to be able to invest in her own appearance than her well educated and childless counterpart. The childfree young women will then mop up as many of these new cultural jobs as are going ( like the fashion multi-taskers referred to above). This creates a new perhaps even more unsurmountable barrier between young mothers who cannot afford the time for after-hours networking and those other young women for whom the boundary between work and leisure is constantly eroded. Project work picked up on the grapevine appears to be exactly ‘good luck’. Or the disappearing-structures are replaced by a ‘scene’ or ‘atmosphere’ where the buzz of ‘talent’ and the blurring of the interface between work and leisure conceal the material obstacles which limit the mobility and the self discovery of ‘talent’ on the grounds of poor location, poor education, poor access to the social capital of the network, and lack of access to funds to fall back on between jobs or while working for nothing in the hope of it being turned into a paid job. Needless to say these are risks which older people cannot afford to take. There is an unthinkable indignity of older people ‘working for nothing’ in the hope of it turning into a real job.
The young people (die in diesem Bereich arbeiten hingegen?) are being designated agents of the neo-liberal order, expected to see it through into fruition, relying only on their own talents, lonely, mobile, over- worked individuals for whom socialising and leisure are only more opportunities to do a deal. The Green Paper produces the categories of talent and creativity as disciplinary regimes, whose subjects are taught and told (apparently from birth onwards through primary, secondary and tertiary education,) to inspect themselves, look deep inside themselves for capacities which will then serve them well in the future. If culture is thought of as a ‘complex strategic situation’ (Spivak 1999) then the brilliant additional move in this new discursive formation is that it simultaneously appears to do away with older forms of reliance on labour markets, on the dull compulsion of labour, on routine, mindless activities. There is now scope for ‘pleasure in work’ and as Donzelot argued appealing to the authentic self, has the incredible advantage of turning the individual into a willing work-horse, self flagellating when the inspiration doesn’t flow out onto the page (Donzelot 1989). The Green Paper celebrates the importance of creativity and its encouragement in schools, nurseries, at home, and in other cultural institutions. Children and young people will have to do more than routine tasks, they will now be expected to be creative. Even if they don’t go on the earn a living in the cultural sector thinking creatively is now at the heart of the new knowledge economy. But most important is the disconnect feature, the aim is to be individually successful. But success here means self reliant, self employed and successfully independent of state, welfare and subsidy. This is a way of transforming the future world of work.
Post-Individualist Cultural Practice
This all mounts up to a considerable challenge to sociologists like myself wishing to find ways of inventing ‘creative-work solidarities’. If the institutions (or non institutions) of the new culture are ‘almost unrecognisable’ then it follows that whatever political sociality which will appear will take an almost unimaginable shape. If indeed even the notion of the new social movement now seems incapable to tracking the flows of ‘labour power’ (see Hardt and Negri 2000) and harnessing its potential into something more stable and concrete then perhaps we are thinking about post-individual political formations. It might be possible to look forward to alliances emerging of ‘new labour’ (what an irony) on a fluid, international basis, connecting somehow the self-exploiter at home sweating over her sewing machine in the hope of becoming the next Stella McCartney and the Gap seamstress in the South East Asia, who is now the object of attention from the anti-capitalist protest movement. A key element in the chain of equivalence by which means alliances and partnerships in this field of youthful cultural economic activity might be formed is through the interventionist role of intellectuals of perhaps an ‘older generation’. We have to confront the embeddedness of business studies and enterprise culture in a population who have not grown up as subjects of ‘welfare regime’, ‘public mindedness’ and public sector employment. (Denn?) If the categories no longer exist then neither do the subjects.
Literatur
Donzelot (1989): Plessure in Work. In: Rose n. et al. (eds): The Foucault Effect. Chicago (???)
Green Paper (2001): Culture and Creativity Ten years On. London
Hardt M. and Negri A. (2000): Empire. Cambridge (???)
McRobbie (1998): British Fashion design - Rag Trade or Image Industry? London
Spivak (1999): ???
Warhurst C. et al (2000): Looking Good, Sounding Right. Style Counselling for the Unemployed in Industrial Society. London
Zukin (1988): ???
