Critique of Creativity Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative Industries’ Gerald Raunig, Gene Ray & Ulf Wuggenig (eds) may f l y Critique of Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative Industries’ Gerald Raunig, Gene Ray & Ulf Wuggenig (eds) Creativity is astir: reborn, re-conjured, re-branded, resurgent. The old myths of creation and creators – the hallowed labors and privi- leged agencies of demiurges and prime movers, of Biblical world- makers and self-fashioning artist-geniuses – are back underway, producing effects, circulating appeals. Much as the Catholic Church dresses the old creationism in the new gowns of ‘intelligent design’, the Creative Industries sound the clarion call to the Cultural Entre- preneurs. In the hype of the ‘creative class’ and the high flights of the digital bohemians, the renaissance of ‘the creatives’ is visibly enacted. The essays collected in this book analyze this complex re- surgence of creation myths and formulate a contemporary critique of creativity. may f l y www.mayflybooks.org Today, at one and the same time, scholarly publishing is drawn in two directions. On the one hand, this is a time of the most exciting theoretical, political and artistic projects that respond to and seek to move beyond global administered society. On the other hand, the publishing industries are vying for total control of the ever-lucrative arena of scholarly publication, creating a situation in which the means of distribution of books grounded in research and in radical interrogation of the present are increasingly restricted. In this context, MayFlyBooks has been established as an independent publishing house, publishing political, theoretical and aesthetic works on the question of organization. MayFlyBooks publications are published under Creative Commons license free online and in paperback. MayFlyBooks is a not- for-profit operation that publishes books that matter, not because they reinforce or reassure any existing market. 1. Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory 2. Dag Aasland, Ethics and Economy: After Levinas 3. Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (eds), Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique 4. Steffen Böhm and Siddhartha Dabhi (eds), Upsetting the Offset: The Political Economy of Carbon Markets 5. Peter Armstrong and Geoff Lightfoot (eds), ‘The Leading Journal in the Field’: Destabilizing Authority in the Social Sciences of Management 6. Carl Cederström and Casper Hoedemaekers (eds), Lacan and Organization 7. Félix Guattari and Antonio Negri, New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty 8. Gerald Raunig, Gene Ray and Ulf Wuggenig (eds), Critique of Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative Industries’ CRITIQUE OF CREATIVITY Critique of Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative Industries’ Gerald Raunig, Gene Ray and Ulf Wuggenig (eds) First published in English by MayFlyBooks in paperback in London and free online at www.mayflybooks.org in 2011. Printed by the MPG Books Group in the UK CC: The editors & authors 2011 ISBN (Print) 978-1-906948-13-9 ISBN (PDF) 978-1-906948-14-6 This work has been published in conjunction with the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (www.eipcp.net) and with support of Wien Kultur. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Contents Contents vii Contributors ix Acknowledgements xv Introduction: On the Strange Case of ‘Creativity’ and its Troubled Resurrection 1 Gerald Raunig, Gene Ray and Ulf Wuggenig PART ONE: CREATIVITY 7 1 Immanent Effects: Notes on Cre-activity 9 Stefan Nowotny, translated by Aileen Derieg 2 The Geopolitics of Pimping 23 Suely Rolnik, translated by Brian Holmes 3 The Misfortunes of the ‘Artistic Critique’ and of Cultural Employment 41 Maurizio Lazzarato, translated by Mary O’Neill 4 ‘Creativity and Innovation’ in the Nineteenth Century: Harrison C. White and the Impressionist Revolution Reconsidered 57 Ulf Wuggenig, translated by Larissa Buchholz, Aileen Derieg and Karl Hoffmann PART TWO: PRECARIZATION 77 5 Virtuosos of Freedom: On the Implosion of Political Virtuosity and Productive Labour 79 Isabell Lorey, translated by Mary O’Neill 6 Experiences Without Me, or, the Uncanny Grin of Precarity 91 Brigitta Kuster and Vassilis Tsianos, translated by Aileen Derieg 7 Wit and Innovation 101 Paolo Virno, translated by Arianne Bové PART THREE: CREATIVITY INDUSTRIES 107 8 GovernCreativity, or, Creative Industries Austrian Style 109 Monika Mokre, translated by Aileen Derieg 9 The Los Angelesation of London: Three Short Waves of Young People’s Micro-Economies of Culture and Creativity in the UK 119 Angela McRobbie 10 Unpredictable Outcomes / Unpredictable Outcasts: On Recent Debates over Creativity and the Creative Industries 133 Marion von Osten 11 Chanting the Creative Mantra: The Accelerating Economization of EU Cultural Policy 147 Raimund Minichbauer, language edited by Aileen Derieg PART FOUR: CULTURE INDUSTRY 165 12 Culture Industry and the Administration of Terror 167 Gene Ray 13 Add Value to Contents: The Valorization of Culture Today 183 Esther Leslie 14 Creative Industries as Mass Deception 191 Gerald Raunig, language edited by Aileen Derieg Bibliography 205 Contributors Brigitta Kuster is a cultural producer primarily active as video-maker and author. She has dealt with the themes of migration and transnational space, the representation of labor, gender and sexual identity. She has also collaborated with Pauline Boudry, Renate Lorenz and others in a long-term interdisciplinary research project on labor and sexuality. She received the Swiss Art Award in 2006 and 2010. Maurizio Lazzarato is a sociologist, philosopher and independent researcher specialized in studies of relationships of work, economy and society. He works at the University of Paris I. His recent publications include Le gouvernement des inégalités: critique de l’insécurité néolibérale (2008); with Antonella Corsani, Intermittents et précaires (2008); Etude statistique, économique et sociologique du régime d’assurance chômage des professionnels du spectacle vivant, du cinéma et de l’audiovisuel (2005); Les révolutions du capitalisme, Les empêcheurs de penser en rond (2004), and Les mutations du travail sur le territoire de la Plaine St. Denis (2003). Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics in the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Walter Benjamin (Reaktion, 2007), Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (2005), Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (2002) and Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (2000). She is on the editorial boards of the journals Historical Materialism, Radical Philosophy and Revolutionary History. Isabell Lorey is a political scientist, Visiting Professor at the Humboldt University, Berlin (2010 and 2011), Visiting Professor for Gender ix Contributors Studies, Biopolitics and Postcolonial Studies at the Faculty for Social Science, Vienna University (2009), and previously Assistant Professor for Gender & Postcolonial Studies at the University of the Arts Berlin (2001-2007). She has published on: feminist and political theory, biopolitical governmentality, critical whiteness studies, political immunization, and precarization. Figuren des Immunen: Elemente einer politischen Theorie, her habilitation on Roman struggles of order, the Plebeian, concepts of community and immunization, was published with diaphanes in 2011. Angela McRobbie is Professor of Communications at Goldsmiths College, London. Her special topics of research are: gender and feminist theory and cultural studies, and ‘precarious labour’ in art worlds and in the new culture industries. She is the author of In the Culture Society: Art, Fashion and Popular Music (1999), The Uses of Cultural Studies: A Textbook (2005), The Aftermath of Feminism (2008) and Sexuality, Gender and Generation: Postfeminist Art and Culture (2010). Her current research on the ‘new culture industry’ will be published as Be Creative: Precarious Labour in Art and Cultural Worlds, London, Berlin, Glasgow. Raimund Minichbauer has conducted a wide range of studies and research projects in the cultural sector since 1995. He works with the European Instituter fo Progressive Cultural Policies (eipcp), where he was member of the coordinating teams of the transnational projects republicart (2002-2005), translate (2005-2008) and transform (2005- 2008). He is currently working on the multi-year research project Creating Worlds (2009-2012). He is co-editor, with Maria Lind, of European Cultural Policies (2005). Monika Mokre is a Researcher of the Institute for European Integration Research (EIF), Austrian Academy of Sciences. She is a board member of FOKUS, the Austrian Association for Cultural Economics and Policy Studies, a member of eipcp, and a Lecturer at the Universities of Innsbruck, Salzburg and Vienna. Her research focuses on European democracy and the public sphere, cultural politics and financing of the arts, media politics, and gender studies. Her most recent publications in English are Exchange and Deception: A Feminist Perspective (2010, co-edited with Caroline Gerschlager) and Culture and External Relations: