THE CREATIVE IMPERATIVE: REMAKING CAPITAL/REMAKING LABOUR

The adjective 'creative' and the abstract noun 'creativity' have been on a wild ride just lately. Where once they referred almost exclusively to artistic practice, in recent times they have become the buzzwords of new capitalism. There is hardly a corporate vision statement, a 'master plan for restructuring', or job advertisement that does not refer to creativity. Additionally, it has become a lifestyle zeitgeist in an era of increasingly precarious employment. The shelves of bookshops in hipster neighbourhoods are littered with self-help and career-advice books with creativity in the title (Barton, 2016; de Bono, 2015; Ingeldew, 2016; Judkins, 2016): Liberate your creative instincts! Take control of your life! A word that once signified independent self-expression has now become both a motto of neo-liberalism and a panacea for its consequences.

In one sense, there is nothing remarkable about this semantic slippage. Language is never fixed; all words change meaning through use. But this particular transition is historically important: it is symptomatic of capitalism's epochal quest to reorganize relations of production and reconstruct labour power. However, as we argued, the brave new world of the creative economy is as yet more planned than realized. Its proponents point to digital renewal, and in particular the success of Silicon Valley 'unicorns' like Apple, Google, Amazon. But there is little evidence of widespread social benefits from the tech boom. The core creative workforces employed by such companies are very small when compared with the numbers employed by Fordist enterprises in the mid-twentieth century. So without widespread reasonably paid creative employment it is difficult to argue that the benefits of the sort of economic restructuring craved by policymakers will flow to workers.

The quest to marry art and economy is formidable. In bridging the void that separates the old and new economies, employers and policymakers face the problem of how to conscript cultural energies and practices that, as Bruno Gulli (2005) has argued, were traditionally situated outside the wage relation. Creativity is not easily summoned up by strict managerial direction. How does capitalism harness workers' ludic and imaginative impulses, and their intellectual curiosity, to the project of building the new economy? The inexorable logic of twentieth-century capitalism, with its high-handed management techniques, was such as to banish culture and creativity from the field of productive labour. We will return to this question in Chapter 7. In this chapter we will explore the different appropriations of creativity by labour and capital. To understand the magnitude of the task of economic renewal, it is helpful to consider the etymology of culture and creativity.

Genealogy of Culture and Creativity

Although archaeological evidence – such as cave paintings and carvings on animal bones – suggests that the human capacity for symbolic communication is primordial, it was only around ten thousand years ago that the material conditions emerged for cultural practice in a modern sense. At this point, in the region known to prehistorians as the Fertile Crescent, roughly congruent with modern-day Iraq, human beings began to plant crops and establish sedentary communities with complex divisions of labour. Such arrangements gave people time for symbolic practice and intellectual life separate from labour, and associated with personal enrichment. Indeed, Williams (1988, p. 87) charts the connection between culture and cultivation:

Culture in all its early uses was a noun of process: the tending of something, basically crops or animals [...] From [the early sixteenth century] the tending of natural growth was extended to a process of human development.

He observed that in 1605 philosopher Francis Bacon wrote of the 'culture and manurance of minds', suggesting a metaphorical connection between the enrichment of the soil and the cultural improvement of the self. The word 'creativity' comes from a different root – from the Latin creare (to generate, or give birth to). Prior to the Renaissance, as Williams (1988) states, the modern notion of human creativity was largely unthinkable. For the most part, 'create' appeared in the past tense to refer to God's handiwork. The word 'creatures' was derived from the same root as creation, and, from an ecclesiastical perspective, no creature (including man) could itself be a creator. Only during the Renaissance did the role of artist-creator become legitimate, and with it the idea of people as originators of knowledge and culture rather than as ciphers of the divine. The romantic idea of creativity, of the cultivation of aesthetic sensibility, treats the work of art as a revelation of self, an expression of emotional interiority (Abercrombie et al., 1986).

Under the conditions of the Industrial Revolution, work and creativity became antithetical. As Marx observed, the inexorable logic of capitalist enterprise was to rob workers of any sense of fulfilment. Gone was the Ruskinian calm of craftwork and the satisfaction of producing the complete product because industrial labour alienated the proletariat from the products of their labour, reducing them to functionaries on a production line. At the same time, capitalism concentrates production in certain times and places. It separates work and home and orders working time around the quotidian rhythms of factory production, by contrast with the seasonal imperatives that organize agricultural labour (Thompson, 1963). Where once many of the necessities of life were produced at the household and small, local workshop level – for example, foodstuffs, textiles, clothing – gradually and inexorably these things came to be replaced by manufactured commodities.

As workers were yoked to machines, so households became primarily places where labour power was reproduced: workers nourished and rested, children raised. Feminists have observed that it was usually women who performed the tasks of sustaining and nurturing and that their life worlds were never congruent with the public/private and work/leisure divisions of space and time associated with capitalism. Despite this, the model of the nuclear family household, as primarily a place of repose and retreat, first emerged within the Victorian bourgeoisie but was gradually proselytized amongst working people in the emerging urban centres in industrial societies. The idea that cultural, ludic and leisure pursuits were separate from work has been central to modernist and utilitarian thinking, but later, as workers achieved reductions in working hours through collective action, they found themselves...