::fibreculture:: Is Culture an Industry?

[Andrew Murphie]

thanks for raising this Mathieu. I must admit I feel torn about the creative
industries. My initial response was extremely suspicious. I've since seen so
much great work done by those working in the discipline. It's also great to
see the work done to garner by those at the top of the creative industries
tree to garner support for many in the academy, who are often among the best
thinkers in the humanities. Whether it has assisted "creative workers"
genuinely or just expanded the opportunities for precarious labour, however,
is an interesting question, without a clear answer. However, let's return to
my problems with the whole concept. I felt that it looked to me dangerous on
two fronts.

First, it is a response to the quite reasonable feeling that neither artists
not the humanities have much "power", in the old-fashioned sense. I guess in
the Foucauldian sense you could say that things were - technically -
configured badly for artists and humanities academics in terms of power. Yet
the response is disciplinary in every sense - by which I mean it creates new
"disciplines" within the academy that inevitably compete with the older
disciplines, or even alternative contemporary approaches, for funding, for
students etc. Worse perhaps, it disciplines everyone, precisely in terms of
"industry" and economy, but also in terms of rhetoric - here I'm
particularly concerned with the rhetoric of performance. This is a very
common set of problems of course, that many people have discussed. As many
on this list will be aware, there was one complex discussion this set of
issues at the recent mycreativity event in Amsterdam - <
http://www.networkcultures.org/mycreativity/>.

However, the second danger is perhaps less remarked. This is that creative
industries - the rhetoric that demands compliance, the tie-in to
performance-based economies, to capital etc - demands a different kind of
creative work. In fact, not only that, it adds an extra layer of work in
compliance etc, which is indeed hard labour, and which easily begins to
replace creative work. In this, the creative worker's task could be defined
- here more even than elsewhere - as having to make things work despite a
dysfunctional and proliferating regime of compliance (to perform despite
dysfunctional performance measures, etc). I've discussed this at some length
in a blog entry on mobility if anyone's interested. The framework is
thinking about mobility's transformation of love and work (largely following
the very interesting French psychoanalyst of work Christophe Dejours) but I
was surprised to find myself using this in part to think about the
difficulties posed by "creative industries".

The blog, part of a project to see both how you might generate the new with
new media, and also interested in what kinds of institutional practices
might assist along these lines, is found at -

http://researchhub.cofa.unsw.edu.au/ccap/2007/07/10/mobility-work-and-love/

all the best, Andrew

-- 
"Take me to the operator, I want to ask some questions" - Barbara
Morgenstern

"I thought I had reached port; but I seemed to be cast
back again into the open sea" (Deleuze and Guattari, after Leibniz)

Dr Andrew Murphie - Senior Lecturer
School of Media, Film and Theatre, University of New South Wales, Sydney,
Australia, 2052
web:http://media.arts.unsw.edu.au/andrewmurphie/mysite/index.html
http://adventuresinjutland.wordpress.com/
fax:612 93856812 tlf:612 93855548 email: a.murphie at unsw.edu.au
room 311H, Webster Building
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