Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries

by Angela McRobbie

In this exciting new book Angela McRobbie charts the ‘euphoric’ moment of the new creative economy, as it rose to prominence in the UK during the Blair years, and considers it from the perspective of contemporary experience of economic austerity and uncertainty about work and employment.

McRobbie makes some bold arguments about the staging of creative economy as a mode of ‘labour reform’; she proposes that the dispositif of creativity is a fine-tuned instrument for acclimatising the expanded, youthful urban middle classes to a future of work without the raft of entitlements and security which previous generations had struggled to win through the post-war period of social democratic government.

Adopting a cultural studies perspective, McRobbie re-considers resistance as ‘line of flight’ and shows what is at stake in the new politics of culture and creativity. She incisively analyses ‘project working’ as the embodiment of the future of work and poses the question as to how people who come together on this basis can envisage developing stronger and more protective organisations and associations. Scattered throughout the book are excerpts from interviews with artists, stylists, fashion designers, policy-makers, and social entrepreneurs.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published November 10, 2014

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Creativity is clearly where it is all at: we’re reminded continually that we live in a ‘creative economy’; we’re encouraged as teachers to instil, even teach, creativity; a growing number of ‘person specifications’ for jobs across a range of areas identify ‘creativity’ as a desirable and sometimes essential attribute. But, of course, we cannot be too creative – we must be creative within the rules of the game as if we live in a chaotic fractal, where we may not know exactly what will happen but we know the bounds of the system outside which we cannot step: the powers that be don’t want us to be too creative, and thereby challenge their Power.

It is in this turmoil of creativity, or what Pascal Gielen calls ‘creativism’ that Angela McRobbie’s excellent new book has such power. Here she turns her attention not to the ideological practice of ‘creativity’ as a weapon of the powerful to shore up their privilege, but to the structure and form of labour and work in the creative industries as both a form of neo-liberal practice at a micro level, of self-discipline and biopolitical self-regulation and as a form of labour market reform to wind back the gains of the 20th century, to instil and enforce a normalization of precariousness and to remake labour.

Part of the strength of the case is McRobbie’s breadth and depth of engagement with this area of work in the cultural/creative industries; it began as a focus in her work in the mid- to late-1980s and by the mid-1990s, so that by the time British Fashion Design appeared she had pretty much defined the field of labour studies in cultural studies – although like most of her work in this area, this is a fundamentally sociological analysis. The argument weaves together several usually disparate strands: there is the individualising romanticism of Blairite cultural policy, as well as the more deep-seated romanticism of work in the ‘creative’ industries; there is the wider economic transformations associated with post-Fordist production with its just-in-time models of production and distribution; there is a compelling case that these post-Fordist models mark and mask a re-gendering of work as affective and feminised; and there is a profound tension between the individualising tendency of cultural policy and shifts in the UK and a residual social democratic potential in other jurisdictions including the profoundly neo-liberalised EU.

Rather than a singular argument, however, these six substantive chapters (plus richly a developmental introduction and conclusion) are interwoven but relatively free-standing essays. There is certainly a progression from repoliticisation of clubs that become companies, as sites of autonomy become spaces of capital reproduction, through the creative policies of Blair era, to the labour processes of human capital and of performative affective (feminised) labour to an exploration of options in the form of social democratically inflected small scale art/fashion/textile production projects in Berlin and a critique of Richard Sennett’s work on craft labour. Through all this, McRobbie’s gasp of the field is shown in her theoretical and analytical agility, drawing sceptically on Foucault and Bourdieu, on Hardt & Negri and others in the Operaismo tradition, on Stuart Hall, on policy framers such as Charlie Leadbetter while all the way weaving in an underpinning foundation of risk society/flexible accumulation approaches derived from Ulrich Beck & Scott Lash.

This theoretical agility does not mean that there is a sloppiness to McRobbie’s concepts: the book is held together by an analysis and unpacking of what she calls ‘passionate work’. In this we see the means by which labour has been reformed, how a disposition to creativity within passionate work means that a newly emerged creative middle class accept, or at least tolerate, the terms of precariousness (although she is not satisfied with the rejection of class this requires for some analysts in the Operaismo tradition) providing a model for and a site of labour market reform in favour of the needs post-Fordist production: the much vaunted ‘labour market flexibility’ so beloved of neo-liberalism. It is the clarity of these concepts that makes what could otherwise have been an exceptionally difficult discussion merely demanding; this is, of course, not a simple read – the issues it engages with and the complexity of the field means that there are demands placed on us as readers if we are to get the case and find ways to translate it into other settings, outside the UK, or outside the specific arts/culture/fashion creative industries McRobbie focusses on – but that is as it should be. These demands are what make the analysis so important.

This case, that the creative industries are providing the model and base for ongoing changes to work and labour, is compelling, but some of the absences are surprising. For instance, given the emphasis on changes in work and labour, and the discussions of precariousness/precarité I would have expected to see some reference to Guy Standing’s work, especially A Precariat Charter . Equally surprising is that her case that ‘creative work’ provides the basis for embedding neo-liberal modes of labour, she has not picked up on Pascal Gielen’s case (for instance, in The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude that historically the arts have provided a model for the kind of precarious labour markets and processes being explored here, or his critique of creativism noted earlier.

These are quibbles, and do not undermine the power of the case – although attention to them (I say that noting the limitations imposed by publishers contracts) would have strengthened the analysis by showing how it can be located in wider contemporary debates and struggles. Even so, McRobbie has set the base for significant developments in our understanding of and work in and around labour in the new economy. Essential reading, and more than once.

[Lena · Rating 3 out of 5]

McRobbie brings interesting arguments about the new creative economy, characterized by freelancing and temp jobs, a reliance on informal social networks, and a complicated relationship with consumer culture, where the romanticized notion of art is used to justify low earnings. She draws heavily from her research in fashion and feminism and her experiences in London. I enjoyed her analysis on the genderized role of career, a subject she has written extensively about, where "being a career girl is something young women are both congratulated for and required to express gratitude for."

Overall, her case studies are insightful and interesting, but the chapters where she spends the bulk of her time summarizing other researchers' work fall a bit flat. I also found her notes about the role of the public sector and attempts to bring in non-eurocentric perspectives unfocused.