CFP reminder: The creative industries and collaborative production – submissions due 18 September 2015
Confirmed keynote speakers:
Sarah Brouillette, Carleton University
Damian Sutton, Middlesex University
A symposium organised by The Promotional Cultures Research Group, Middlesex University
Friday 13th November 2015
At the centre of creative economy discourse lies a somewhat anachronistic proposition. The form of value that this economy is built upon stems from a romantic conception of individual creativity: of the cultural worker-as-artist. The ‘creative industries' presupposes that ‘culture’ is a commodity mass-produced through the immaterial labour of people for whom such work functions not as a means to an end (ie. a wage), but rather as the ultimate form of self-expression. The premise of an industrial mode of production positions these individuals within a putative ‘creative class’; yet the post-Fordist imperative of neoliberal governance that actually structures these ‘industries’ requires that these worker-artists must individuate as Foucault’s entrepeneurs of the self—as the ‘authors’ of their lives/work—in order for their labour to gain currency in the marketplace.
This paradox is seemingly at odds with the realities of production in the various fields and sectors that are taken to comprise these industries. In the influential work of Henry Jenkins et al. (2013) for example, the creative practices of consumer participation and co-creation are deemed central to the commercial success of these industries as both content and value now ‘spreads’ horizontally through digital networks. Adam Arvidsson (2013) similarly argues that ‘socialized networks of productive collaboration’ (eg. peer-to-peer networks) utilise common resources and presage the emergence of what he calls an ‘ethical economy’. Yet he also notes that corporations have for some time been attempting to capitalise on the ‘intangible’ value that is created and circulated in such collaborative publics.
A more critical view of such developments can be traced in discussions of subjectivisation and exploitation in and through ‘creative labour’ (Ursell 2000, McRobbie 2002, Maxwell and Miller 2006, Gill 2008, 2014, MccGuigan 2010, Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011). Sarah Brouillette (2014) develops this line of argument but also, like Mark Banks (2010), points to the ways in which other forms of craft or non-creative labour remain (or indeed may have become) structurally necessary for ‘creative labour’ to take place - yet are typically elided in creative economy discourses.
What emerges from a review of this literature is a sense that networked, collaborative and cooperative working practices and assemblages have been under-examined in cultural economy and creative labour research. A number of pressing questions therefore arise from an enquiry into the relationship between creativity, cooperation and value in the creative industries:
• What is relationship between creativity and autonomy in the processes of collaborative production that attend, for instance, book publishing, film production or content marketing?
• What roles are played by promotion and reputation in the valorisation of collaborative or cooperative cultural work?
• What evidence is there to suggest that the creative industries are or might be developed around an ethical regime of collaborative publics (Arvidsson) as opposed to the exploitative valorisation of individual creativity (Brouillette)?
• What new models of authorship might be traced in collaborative forms of production and creative practice?
Internal (Middlesex) participants in the symposium will address and develop these questions through papers that engage with otherwise discrete cultural fields:
• Assembling authority through social media networks: Indian journalist-writers and twitter;
• Autonomy through cooperation: social enterprise publishing as an ‘art world’;
• Digital work and value production;
• The creative industries and new economic and labour models: from practice to homological form in globalised film and TV production.
External speakers are invited to submit proposals (250 words + author bio) that speak to these themes or address any of the questions set out above by Friday 18th September. Participants will be invited by mid-October.
Please send proposals or queries to: James Graham, convener of the Promotional Cultures Research Group, [log in to unmask]
For details of current and past projects by members of the Promotional Cultures Research Group, see: http://www.mdx.ac.uk/our-research/research-groups/promotional-cultures-research-group
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