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MyCreativity Reader
Rossiter here points to the political potential of ‘creative labour’ that he locates at the level of organisation. In order to appreciate this argument one needs to specify the post-autonomist argument about capitalism’s ontological turn in terms of its organisational articulation. Neoliberalism’s systematic disorganisation of production, Rossiter argues, represented also a departure from the transcendent rigidity of modern organisation. It is well known that Gilles Deleuze conceptualised such a change in organisational strategy in terms of a shift from moulding to modulation: what was previously arrested in the moulds of the confinement is now allowed to flow within the channels of more topological or process-like arrangements.13 Instead of pre-emptively imposing a metric pattern of moulds on the creative forces, the neoliberal organisation of labour prefers modes of control that are able to flexibly modulate the creative process per se. As Foucault has shown in La Naissance de la Biopolitique, the logic of neoliberalism is to act not directly on but around the creative process of living labour.14 Hence, neoliberalism’s demand of super-human flexibility and dynamism, its reinvention of living labour in terms of a perpetually self-improving ‘human capital’ necessitates a structural opening that capital cannot fully control. With particular reference to the creative industries, Rossiter defines ‘creative labour’ in terms of being ‘disorganised’ in order to foreground its political potential: here, he argues, the neoliberal disorganisation of production is predicated on an emerging network ecology that holds the potential for the self-organisation of ‘creative labour’. It cannot be denied that there are self-organising groups of creative workers – such the French Intermittents – that use network ecologies as their mode of organisation. However, if one moves up the network a bit, say to the level of the EuroMayDay networks, one realises that the practice of organised networks is by no means a privilege of so-called ‘creative labour’. This is not to dismiss Rossiter’s argument at all. To the contrary, his analysis is absolutely crucial as it points toward political trajectories that are opening up as capital adjusts to the evolving materiality of social life. What would be problematic is the reductive totalisation (or, in Marxist lingua, fetishisation) of these new forms of labour that understands ‘creative labour’ in terms of a political vanguard.15 Rossiter is clearly aware of this problem, which might have been one of the reasons for inviting Valery Alzaga from Justice for Janitors to MyCreativity. Her powerful political message was a reminder to the assembled ‘creative workers’ that any consequent attempt to understand the creative network of living labour under conditions of neoliberalism must include those armies of workers whose activities would not so easily receive the label ‘creative’. Looking at neoliberal, disorganised capitalism it is paramount to realise that its economic network ecologies are themselves constituted by those creative networks that the post-autonomists approach in terms of social bios, virtuosity, inter-cerebral cooperation and so on. These creative networks not only extend throughout the entire social field, they are also ontologically prior to any division that capital might insert into it.
13. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on Control Societies’, in Negotiations, 1972-1990, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, pp. 177-182. 14. Michel Foucault, La Naissance de la Biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France 1978-1979, Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2004. 15. Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, London: Pluto Press, 2002.
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The crucial argument to be put forward with respect to the creative industries is that they are indeed the product of such an insertion. This is to say that the proliferation of economies of intensified creativity and invention cannot be conceptualised without reference to the simultaneous expansion of a new kind of economies of intensified repetition. The latter takes the form of a network of generic labour among which feature the aforementioned janitors. Today, such generic labour has become a massive phenomenon. One of its genealogical sources can be found in the post-war practice of corporations to vertically disintegrate (a trend arriving in Europe and the US via Japanese automobile manufacturers), i.e. to outsource their supply chain. In the late 1980s, the practice of outsourcing began to invade the organisation structure per se. What began with janitors and technical staff soon reached those repetitive administrative processes that until recently were considered to be integral part of any given organisation: information technology, accounting, financial services, payroll, human resources, customer relations, etc. The massive growth of these kinds of outsourcing has resulted in the emergence of an archipelago of neo-factories of concentrated organisational routine hidden in the periphery of an ostensibly creative economy. There is now a wide network of intensively repetitive labour that almost invisibly sustains the ‘liberated’ organisational arrangements within which capitalism’s contemporary pseudo-creativity can thrive. Developing a proper understanding of the interface between economies of difference and economies of repetition (the latter of which includes intensified industrial production) will require a good deal of research. However, it does appear reasonable to assume that in order to make sense politically of creativity under conditions of contemporary capitalism, these two economies need to be conceptually brought together. Nigel Thrift describes neoliberal network ecology as a situation in which, ‘more and more companies are becoming like project co-ordinators, outsourcing the “business-as-usual” parts of their operations so that they can be left free to design and orchestrate new ideas’.16 Today the generation of these new ideas and ‘immaterial’ goods is increasingly outsourced to the ‘liberated’ spaces in which ‘creative labour’ dwells (unless it is ‘crowdsourced’ to potential consumers). Perhaps it would be apposite to speak of a new division of labour along the lines of difference and repetition, held together by the mediation of Thrift’s project-coordinators. Whatever is created within the arbitrarily defined context of the creative industries is the result of a creative social process that cannot be reduced to an internal affair of ‘creative labour’. If there is anything to be learned from a post-autonomous approach to contemporary capitalism, it is that creativity does not belong to an actual social group but rather is an immanent property of a social multiplicity that precedes the structures of exploitation. Neoliberal capitalism’s division and intensification of economies of difference and economies of repetition should not make us forget the Deleuzean (originally Tardian) insight that creativity includes both, difference and repetition. In the context of neoliberal capitalism in general and the creative industries in particular, it might be an insight whose repetition will make an important analytical difference.
16. Nigel Thrift, ‘Re-Inventing Invention: New Tendencies in Capitalist Commodification’, Economy and Society 35.2 (2006): 287.