Authors Jaron Rowan Madirolas
License CC-BY-SA-3.0
The Creative Industries and the Cultural
Commons: Transformations in
Labour, Value and Production
by Jaron Rowan Madirolas
Goldsmiths, University of London
Reg Nº 33035529 PHD Candidate
I am Jaron Rowan and I declare that I am the author of the contents included in
the following work except when quoted as such
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Abstract
The following work constitutes an inquiry into the economic, social and political composition of
what are commonly known as the cultural or creative industries. My aim is to provide a critique
of the discursive origins, political dimensions, economic models and subjective constructions
that shape the complex set of practices and discourses that comprise the creative industries. To
do so, this work looks into the production of a set of schemes, policies, plans, economic
models, modes of labour, regulations and discourses that have been designed in order to
transform cultural practices into economic activities. I will contextualize these transformations
within a general framework of what has been branded ‘cognitive capitalism’, acknowledging that
this process needs to be understood with reference to the neoliberalization of the wider
economy through focusing on a set of changes in the nature of labour, value and creativity. I
then attempt to understand the ecosystem in which the creative industries are enmeshed. In
order to do so, I will discuss the notion of the cultural commons: the pools of collective ideas
and knowledge from which these enterprises capture their raw material. Not only will this give
an understanding of the nature of the sources of knowledge and ideas that feed the creative
industries but will also to provide a good opportunity to understand the communities, objects
and relations that shape them. Finally there is a discussion on the tensions, bifurcations and
alternatives that escape the hegemonic economic models promoted by policy. This will open up
possibilities in which to think of forms of self-organization and commons-based cultural
enterprises that might provide new spaces in which the economy and culture can meet.
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For Peri and Ric
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Contents
Abstract................................................................................................................................2
Chapter 0. Introduction.......................................................................................................5
Chapter One. Cognitive Capitalism and Neoliberalism: a Framework............................13
Chapter Two. The Creative Industries as a New Economic Paradigm...........................36
Chapter Three. The Cultural Commons...........................................................................69
Chapter Four. The Individualization of Work I: The Rise of Cultural
Entrepreneurship...............................................................................................................97
Chapter Five. Individualization of Work II: Between Precarity and Coolness, or the
Discrete Pleasure of Creative Work.................................................................................129
Chapter Six. Creative Basins, the Commons and Unstable Infrastructures...................153
Chapter Seven. Parasitism and Capture of the Cultural and Digital Commons............176
Chapter Eight. Conclusions............................................................................................202
Bibliography....................................................................................................................212
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Chapter 0.
Introduction
5
‘It’s all about the money’
From "All 'Bout the Money" by Meja
The following work constitutes an inquiry into the economic, social and political composition of
what has been branded as the cultural or creative industries. My aim is to provide a critique of
the discursive origins, political dimensions, economic models and subjective constructions that
shape this complex set of practices and discourses that some political leaders hoped could
become an economic sector. This work looks into the production of a set of schemes, policies,
plans, economic models, modes of work, regulations and discourses that have been designed to
transform cultural practices into economic activities. In order to do so I will address notions of
value, ownership, labour, infrastructure, governance and happiness to examine how industrial
transformations couple with new forms of governance, and how industry and creativity combine
to form the concept of the ‘creative industries’. I will contextualize this transformation of
cultural practices into business models as one of the many aspects that characterize what has
been branded as cognitive capitalism, testing this notion and seeing if it provides a relevant
framework in which to understand these transformations. We must not forget that this process
needs to be understood through the prism of economic neoliberalization and structural changes
that are shaping the face of industry all around the world.
As I will discuss later, some authors question the existence of a unified entity called the “creative
industries”. Acknowledging this critique, in this work the term will refer to the range of
discourses, practices and transformations that have previously received many names and
definitions: the cultural industries, the creative economy, the economy of culture and the
copyright industries. In this work, I will look into these different stages and definitions of what I
consider to be the same process: the neoliberal transformation of cultural practices into
economic activities. My aim is not to reify the creative industries as such, but to offer an
understanding of the relations established between cultural practices, policies, promotion
agencies, subjectivities, desires, forms of value, regulations and cultural commodities that
configure a complex ecosystem, relations that enable some cultural practices and artefacts to
enter the market. I also aim to detect wider social changes that affect the composition of cities,
international networks or labour in an attempt to generate a political economy of the creative
industries.
I intend to explore how this manifests itself in different geographical areas and countries, and
the different ways it has impacted on the local cultural communities. I am interested in seeing
how the official discourses and policies mutate, bifurcate and adapt to different socio-economic
contexts and hence this work particularly focuses on three different regions: the United
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Kingdom, where the creative industries reached their peak of popularity and received major
media and political attention under the New Labour government; Spain, as a second generation
country that received the impact of the discourse and where I have developed most of my
fieldwork; and finally, Brazil, a country experiencing unprecedented economic growth, where
this discourse is currently being implemented and where cultural practices confront directly
some of the models imposed by international agencies. I will show how this process has by no
means been frictionless or easy. Regulations need to be adapted, customs changed, subjectivities
produced and policies modified in order to trigger a major change, namely to promote the
transition of culture understood as a right to be considered as a resource. For this reason this
work constantly looks into the relations and dynamics established between discourses and
policies, practices or productive models and cultural workers or subjectivities. Only by
understanding how these relate can we gather an accurate picture of what the “creative
industries” are and how they operate.
This whole work is articulated around two conceptual strands that are completely intertwined.
On the one hand, there is an attempt to generate what could be called a political economy of the
creative industries, looking at different dimensions - symbolic, social, economic and discursive;
on the other hand, there is a will to understand the ecosystem in which the creative industries
are enmeshed. I believe that the analysis of what I will later describe as cultural commons, that
is, the pools of collective ideas and knowledge from which these enterprises source their raw
material, can help, not only to understand the nature of the sources of knowledge and ideas that
feed the creative industries, but also to provide a good opportunity to understand the
communities, objects and relations that shape them. I will argue that the creative industries have
been devised as an apparatus to capture these common goods from which they feed and in
some instances to which they also contribute. I consider this to be an interesting contribution to
the discussions on this sector because in most cases, as we will see, existing analysis looks into
the economic models, and in some cases the discursive reality of this field, but in no case are
there attempts to understand the ecosystems in which they take part and belong. My aim when
introducing the notion of the commons is to define a political economy of the creative
industries in which its social and productive ecosystem is defined and constantly present. There
is a constant flow of “things”(Appadurai, 1986), ideas and affects between these commons, the
communities that shape them and the enterprises that feed and in some cases, contribute to
them. Understanding the nature of these things (transition stages that go from ideas to
inventions to commodities and back) and the dynamics that define the relations that link them
will help me to depict a complex reality that goes beyond all the analysis and definitions of the
creative industries provided by governmental entities and scholarly research.
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Most of the current academic books that deal with the history of the creative industries, and try
to provide an understanding of,them, (most notoriously Throsby 2000; Caves 2002; Howkins,
2002; Beck 2002; Du Gay & Pryke 2002; Hesmondhalgh 2007; Hartley 2004 or Landry 2008)
fail to address the sources from which this sector gathers its ideas and inspiration. Only some
exceptional cases, namely Bilton 2006 who addresses the notion of creativity in this context, and
Lash & Lury 2007, using the notion of social imaginary, offer some hints on where to start
looking for the productive elements that these industries exploit. By introducing the cultural
commons as part of the ecosystem in which these enterprises operate I hope to open a
completely new dimension to the enquiry into this sector, providing a bigger picture of not only
how the sector is structured but what elements they exploit and how these mechanisms impact
on the communities in which they operate. Using cognitive capitalism as an analytical
framework I hope to show how these productive relations are established and how they fit into
a bigger historical, political and economical perspective.
To do so, this text combines three main tools of interpretation; on the one hand I rely on the
work of a series of post-autonomous Marxist thinkers to establish a philosophical framework
that helps the reader to understand the socio-economic conditions from which this reality
emerged. Discourse analysis is also deployed in order to understand the policies, schemes,
documents, models and narratives that have been produced and that shape this field of work.
Lastly I have conducted a series of interviews in order to understand the living conditions and
subjective dimension of many cultural workers who are active in this sector. The combination of
these different forms of interpretation help to draw a picture of a complex ecosystem in which
policies, legal frameworks, agencies, cultural objects, workers, desires and money collide and
affect each other, giving place to what some have branded as the creative industries.
Before I continue, I must introduce some biographical notes, which I believe are extremely
relevant in order to understand how this work was born and has been conducted. I myself have
been an active worker in the creative sector for more than ten years now. I have a degree in fine
arts and since the year 2000 I have been involved in the art world. In 2003, along with three
other partners, I opened a small production and research company in which I am still involved.
We began providing production services to art centres and cultural spaces until we became
specialized in undertaking cultural research and started to work as consultants to a number of
local and regional governments in Spain and countries in Latin America. We have written policy
documents, strategic plans, defined the conceptual framework for new cultural spaces and
provided training to managers and cultural workers in several countries. We finally started
working for EU institutions, and have taken part in the drafting of cultural policy and strategic
plans specializing in providing an understanding of Free Culture and its implications. In the year
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2005 I also took part in the development of a video art distribution enterprise named
HAMACA, in which I had been a co-director, until 2009 when I became an external consultant
specializing in strategic planning and intellectual property. I have combined this work with the
writing of my PhD. In this sense my ethnographic work constitutes a continuation of my regular
work. My work experience has helped to shape the following pages, and these reflections have
obviously had an impact on my work. Some of the ideas and anxieties that trigger the following
volume stem from a need to understand the context in which I have been operating and which I
have to deal with on a daily basis. This will help to contextualize the tone and ideas that
constitute the following work.
This work is made up of seven more chapters and a conclusion. Throughout the first chapter, I
will analyze the current literature on the concept of cognitive capitalism, the set of mutations
that have taken place in the ways in which contemporary capitalism operates, altering its cycles
of production, valorization and growth in order to introduce knowledge as its central resource.
This chapter helps me to establish a philosophical and economic framework from which to
begin analyzing the ways in which cultural practices have progressively entered the economic
arena. Cognitive capitalism, defined by the centrality of knowledge and ideas as productive
elements, the immateriality of labour, the introduction of intellectual property as a tool to
valorise knowledge, the production of subjective dispositions based around creativity and
happiness, the emergence of new working models such as the virtuoso, the entrepreneur and the
precarious worker, and more importantly with the centrality of what will be described as the
general intellect, provides an analytical framework in which we can easily understand the
relevance of the creative industries. These constitute a perfect example of a productive model
that incorporates all these elements and have provided a blueprint for other productive areas to
follow. In this chapter I discuss the work of Maurizio Lazzarato, Paolo Virno, Antonella
Corsani, Emmanuel Rodriguez, Enzo Rullani, Franco Berardi, Yann Moulier-Boutang and Toni
Negri amongst others, setting out the basic parameters in which the following chapters will
develop.
The second chapter addresses the different models and strategies defined to promote the
growth of what was expected to be a new economic sector. Starting from the definition
provided by the Frankfurt School, I will look into a chronology of policies, agencies and
discourses established during the last thirty years in order to promote the economization of
culture. I will show how the cultural industries, when first conceived, constituted a progressive
developmental model that was transformed into a tool aimed at neoliberalizing the cultural
sector. With the arrival of New Labour to government in the UK in 1997 and the promotion of
the creative industries, based on individual skills and the creation of wealth through intellectual
9
property, a clear model was devised in order to tap into the cultural commons and privatize
collective knowledge. A powerful discursive machinery was devised to produce the illusion that
this “new industrial sector” could constitute a key element for the development and growth of
the western economies. I will discuss some of the main problems derived from this model and
question its validity as an economic and social development tool once it has been deployed in
countries with emergent economies. This chapter will also look at how the different discourses
that promote the creative industries converge and differ in order to be implemented in different
contexts.
The third chapter is devoted to exploring the notion of the cultural commons, that is, the
productive resources from which the creative industries gather their ideas, sounds, images,
shapes, colours and knowledge. Stemming from the previous chapter and introducing the
notion of the creative basins, as defined by Lazaratto, Corsani and Negri, I provide an analysis
of the productive elements on which the creative industries feed on. To do so, I first offer an
historical account of the importance of the traditional commons, how they functioned and
analyze the consequences of their enclosure. If in Marx’s point of view, these enclosures were
the necessary step in order to generate the “primitive accumulation” that later gave rise to
capitalism, I will argue that we are now facing a second form of enclosure, in this case affecting
knowledge and ideas, that has helped to give place to the appearance of cognitive capitalism. I
will discuss the importance of intellectual property as a tool designed to capture common goods
and how the creative industries have based their productive model on capturing and
transforming into commodities the elements that constitute the cultural commons. I will also
show that one of the defining elements that shape these commons are the communities which
generate and preserve them. In the following chapters, I will show how the models devised and
implemented by the creative industries’ promotional schemes can have damaging effects and can
even destroy these communities through the individualization of creative work.
The fourth chapter looks at the figure of the cultural entrepreneur, the subjective element
devised to locate sources of creativity, design apparatus of capture and transform cultural
practices and objects into economic returns. I will analyze the discourses and schemes designed
to promote cultural entrepreneurship and the subjective dispositions this new figure must adopt.
With the help of Michel Foucault and following the insights of Joseph A. Schumpeter, I will
insert the figure of the entrepreneur in a tradition of liberal thinking. The transformation of
artists, musicians, designers or filmmakers into business men and women has been by no means
a smooth process; I will discuss some of the contradictions, problems and limitations these
workers face when confronted with the fact that they must be able to make profits out of their
cultural practices. This chapter, which includes ethnographic work, will help to see the spaces of
10
agency and refusal that are generated between the official discourses and the workers affected by
these schemes and programmes. Precarity will be discussed as an ambivalent feature of the
creative industries, as it constitutes the reason why cultural workers in some cases explore the
entrepreneurial possibility but, at the same time, helps to explain the lack of longevity of many
of these small enterprises.
The work in the creative industries is characterised by its discontinuity, flexibility, lack of
economic returns and large amounts of sacrifice. In the fifth chapter I will analyze the concept
of precarity and try to provide an answer as to why cultural workers continue becoming cultural
entrepreneurs, knowingly of the harsh conditions and lack of certainty that pervades this sector.
I will confront two discursive lines, on the one hand the ideas put forward by post-autonomous
thinkers, such as Boltanski and Chiapello, Franco Berardi or Toni Negri, who argue that
flexibility, autonomy, or the need to enjoy one’s job came as a consequence of the social
movements that took place in Europe at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s. They will argue
that management has transformed social demands and transformed them into imperatives. On
the other hand I will look into the Foucauldian tradition comprised by Rose, Donzelot or
Fleming, who argue that notions of pleasure at work, creativity or happiness solely constitute
“technologies of the self”, designed and deployed in order to promote productivity. Finally, I
will look into the consequences of the introduction of notions such as authenticity, “coolness”
or creativity as motivators and elements that contribute to individualize and fragment
communities of cultural workers.
Chapter six is devoted to studying bifurcations and business models that reject the hegemonic
entrepreneurial discourses that have tried to establish more sustainable links with the cultural
commons from which they source their ideas, sounds, images and knowledge. I will develop a
case study in order to understand how alternative business models are emerging from social,
political and cultural communities. To provide a better understanding of this reality I will
analyze what I have termed “unstable infrastructures”, that is, production, distribution and
exchange systems that share emergent properties and, far from being public or private,
constitute important assets for the development of the commons. With this work, I hope to
prove that there are alternatives to the standardized business models promoted by public
schemes and agencies. I will also address the notion of informal work in an attempt to see how
it differs from a notion of commons-based economies opposing the idea of de-regulation to
auto-regulation.
Throughout this whole work, I will discuss the ways in which the creative industries, as a
business model, have devised ways to capture and to tap into forms of knowledge that circulate
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in the social sphere. This could lead us to think that there is some kind of linearity in which the
relation between exploiters and exploited is clearly defined, but this is not the case. To prove so,
along the last chapter of this work, and with the help of Michel Serres, I want to introduce the
figure of the parasite. I will do this in order to understand the different dynamics of production
and appropriation that define the ecosystem comprised by the cultural commons, cultural
enterprises, corporations and social communities. This chapter formulates a critique of those
disciplines and traditions, which have failed to give a detailed account of the different relations
of parasitism, dependence and cooperation that define this ecosystem. Concepts such as
cooperation, participation, collaboration, appropriation and capture will be analyzed and I will
show how porous and close to each other these can be. To do so, I will introduce another case
study, tecnobrega, a music scene that takes place in Brazil. Through the description of the
different kinds of relations that have been developed between the different actors that constitute
the scene, I hope to see how the cultural commons can be turned into a productive resource
without the need of becoming privatized or extinguished.
With this, I hope to provide a deep and challenging understanding of the different agents,
dynamics, relations and desires that configure the creative industries. I also want to present a
critique of some of the discourses and assumptions that have helped to promote this reality.
Finally I hope this work helps to understand the importance of the cultural commons and how
these can define productive and generative relations with this source of ideas, sounds, images
and knowledge. Offering a detailed account of some case studies, analyzing schemes and
policies. and assessing the consequences of the progressive neoliberalization of cultural practices
and objects, this work aspires to analyze, portray and critique the complex reality branded “the
creative industries”.
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Chapter One.
Cognitive Capitalism and
Neoliberalism: a Theoretical
Framework
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“Or come to find that loving is labour,
Labour’s life and life's forever”
“Biomusicology” by
Ted Leo And The Pharmacists
If our aim is to understand the role and importance, speaking in social and economic terms, of
the creative industries in a contemporary socio-political context, we must first research and
enquire into the economic, historical and cultural background in which the sector emerged. This
is why, with the help of the ideas put forward by a heterogeneous group of thinkers and
philosophers, I am going to explore what some authors have branded as “cognitive capitalism”.
The main argument I am going to put forward in this first chapter is that we cannot understand
the arrival and consolidation of the creative industries if we do not outline and define the main
traits of what has been called a new stage of capitalism. The creative industries constitute a
perfect example of the new modes of production and socialization bred under what a group of
post-autonomist authors, that we shall look into further along this chapter, describe as cognitive
capitalism. This concept was put forward in order to highlight the political dimensions that
other descriptions such as “new economy”, “net economy” or “knowledge society” lack. The
notion draws not only on the centrality of knowledge as the main resource and principal
element to be exploited by capitalism but also on the relations developed among producers who
can only produce knowledge through relations of cooperation (or social cooperation). The
Spanish authors and activists Raúl Sanchez and Emmanuel Rodriguez argue in the introduction
of their volume called Capitalismo Cognitivo (Sanchez & Rodriguez, 2004) that “as a political
term this concept focuses not so much on the obvious technical transformations taking place
but on how a myriad of forms of knowledge have been ‘put to work’ ” (Sanchez & Rodriguez,
2004:14); by doing so they want to make clear that the technological transformations have only
facilitated a longer process in which information, signs, ideas and knowledge have become the
main productive elements of the capitalist mode of production. The Italian philosopher Paolo
Virno refines this idea by arguing that “we understand ‘mode of production’ as not only one
particular economic configuration, but also a composite unity of forms of life, a social,
anthropological and ethical cluster” (Virno, 2003b: 47). Thus cognitive capitalism is a formula
which will address not only technological or productive mutations but the ways in which life,
politics and aesthetics are being organized along this new mode of production. By
acknowledging this we can neutralize the most obvious critiques to the notion, those which
argue that any contemporary production process (industrial or creative) implies material and
physical conditions, as it also implies cognitive capacities. Cognitive capitalism doesn’t only
imply knowledge but a myriad of forms of life, or experiencing work. It is affective labour, it
implies a constant transition from material-immaterial-material forms of labour.
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Cognitive capitalism implies a polymorphous process, which mutates constantly and is, at the
moment, in full emergence. The heterogeneous assemblage named society (which comprises
forms of relation, affect, sociability, cultural exchange, counter- and subculture movements,
structures of cooperation, antagonisms, linguistic forms, migrations etc.) is to be understood as
a productive base, as a space for the emergence and production of creativity 1 . The term also
helps to define and qualify those forms of production that have shifted from Fordist and
Taylorist modes to what authors related to the Multitudes journal have described as post-Fordist
modes of production, that is from linear and mechanic process to non-linear bio-mechanic and
cognitive forms of production. Later in this chapter I will discuss the insights and ideas
developed by authors such as Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, Antonella Corsani, Antonio
Negri or Enzo Rullani, who share in common a Marxist philosophical background and in many
cases have worked and developed further some of the thesis sustained by Italian “autonomist”
thinkers. Acknowledging that the different contributions to the concept introduced by these
authors does not constitute a homogeneous body of work and that in many cases contradictions
or conceptual disagreements can emerge, I will try to work on some of the lines that unite the
different positions in order to fully grasp what cognitive capitalism implies. In all cases they note
and define some of the core mutations that have taken place in the ways contemporary
capitalism operates, altering its cycles of production, valorisation and growth. Summarizing, we
could state that cognitive capitalism operates and exploits a central resource: knowledge;
however we must not only conceive knowledge to be a set of ideas but also to comprise
lifestyles, affects, relations and forms of being. The nature of work now combines manual and
industrial labour but also immaterial forms of production; this movement is inclusive, as they
both coexist. Some of these authors will argue that industrial production has been replaced by
forms of social cooperation. The factory has lost its centrality as the locus of production which
now takes place in any given place of what has been termed as the social factory. The limits of
work and leisure have been erased. The laws of value have been exceeded by new forms of
valorization of non-rival and abundant informational goods. The combination of these different
elements provides a basic framework in which to understand cognitive capitalism. I will now
work through some of these concepts, paying attention to the different formulations and ways
of conceiving these changes. This will help me to build a socio-economic context in which the
emergence of the discourses on the creative industries can be properly understood.
1
I will problematize this concept in this work, showing how, far from being a neutral and stable
concept, creativity has strong political consequences and can be understood as an apparatus of power
in a Foucaultian sense.
15
Immaterial Labour
In their seminal work “Immaterial Labour”, the Italian authors Maurizio Lazzarato and Toni
Negri, reflect on the new conditions that define contemporary labour. They write that “research,
design, management and other tertiary activities are reconstituted and remixed along digital
information networks which constitute a key element in order to define the cycles of production
and organization of labour” (Lazzarato & Negri, 1991). To this Virno adds “science,
information, knowledge in general, cooperation, these present themselves as the key support
system of production” (Virno, 2003b: 106). These authors coincide in situating information and
knowledge as the centre of contemporary production, this is the reason why it comes as no
surprise that language has become one of the basic tools for contemporary work. When we refer
to language we are not only implying human speech but we also are addressing computer code,
scientific protocols, aesthetic constellations as well as grammar and oral speech. As Virno argues
“language has been put to work. Social communication has become the raw material, the
instrument and on many occasions the final result of contemporary production” (Virno,
2003:38). Language produces new forms of language, language materializes in code from which
new languages are derived. Written language is constantly remixed, digitalized, transferred and
reassembled. Oral speech, slang, rhymes, orders and reflections share a double reality of being
producers and being produced; they constitute the prime matter of production and are the main
commodity of contemporary capitalism. Virno states that “the primary productive resource of
contemporary capitalism lies in the linguistic-relational abilities of humankind” (Virno,
2003b:102). This implies a very important shift from Fordist modes of production in which “the
intellect remains outside of production; only when the work has been finished does the Fordist
worker read the newspaper, go to the local party headquarters, think, have conversations. In
post-Fordism, however, since the “life of the mind” is included fully within the time-space of
production, an essential homogeneity prevails” (Virno, 2003b:108).
The autonomist philosopher Antonio Negri dates and reflects on the transition from Fordism to
post-Fordism, and like other authors such as Franco Berardi “Bifo”, argues that “this new
epoch starts in the years that follow 1968 and is defined by the following traits: work processes
are increasingly conditioned by the automation of the factories and by the digitalization of
society; productive work loses its centrality in the production process whilst the “social worker”
(that is, the complex dynamics of cooperation born from the productive social networks)
becomes a hegemonic form of production”(Berardi, 2003:91). These productive social networks
replace the factory as the locus of production. Taylorist and Fordist regimes are substituted by
non-linear, knowledge-driven networks. Production becomes decentralized and is dispersed in
society. The factory gives place to what post-autonomist thinkers have termed the “social
16
factory”. The whole of society cooperates, shares information, produces ideas and generates
inventions. A new form of common production starts to emerge. The walls of the factory have
been exceeded. Work and non-work have become redundant categories as, in Virno’s view, both
“develop an identical form of productivity, based on the exercise of generic human faculties:
language, memory, sociability, ethical and aesthetic inclinations, the capacity for abstraction and
learning”(Virno, 2003b:108). There is no point in trying to separate leisure from work, as both
categories rely on the same processes and operate in similar manners. Leisure sites such as cafes
have become productive spaces, and traditional productive spaces (such as factories) are now
large leisure environments (such as museums)2. Desires, ideas, drives and words are central to
economic development, but at the same time as Scott Lash and John Urry argue “information
structures are becoming increasingly central to, indeed increasingly coextensive with, production
systems. In terms of the discursive nature on the knowledge that flows through their ‘arteries’,
production systems have become, not so much dependent or interarticulated with expert
systems, but expert systems themselves” (Lash & Urry, 1993:108). With this we see how
cognitive capitalism is constituted by a meshwork of languages, wires, desires, tools, information
channels, forms of cooperation and packages of information.
One of the main mutations that has taken place with the advent of cognitive capitalism is related
to the sphere of work, which some scholars argue has gone from being a material activity to
become an immaterial enterprise. This thesis was first put forward by Maurizio Lazzarato and
Toni Negri (1991) and one of the central ideas they propound is that “immaterial labour tends
to become hegemonic and this is completely visible”. With the growth of IT, tertiary activities,
education, financial capital or cultural enterprises, manual labour loses its predominance in
favour of a set of activities based on communication and immaterial exchanges of information.
As they put it “work mutates completely into immaterial labour and the workforce turns into
mass intellectuality”(Lazzarato and Negri, 1991). When language replaces heavy tools and
information is the main commodity to be transacted labour has readapted to fit-in with these
new needs. Immaterial labour is now a fundamental basis of production, this affects not only the
nature of work but also the subjectivities of the workers. The whole cycle of reproduction-and
consumption has been transformed as well as the ways in which subjectivities are produced.
This is one of the main transformations these scholars note: the worker’s subjectivity is now not
forged in the factory but produced and crossed by intangible flows and signs that cross the
whole of society.
2
Following the works of Eva Illouz we could argue that the whole category of intimacy has been re-
developed, by doing so the public/private barrier has been effectively erased. See Illouz 2008.
17
As we stated before, when labour becomes immaterial, the differences between work and leisure
become eroded. Lazzarato develops this idea further stating that “the classic categories of labour
are insufficient to provide a clear picture of the whole range of activities and the labour power
unleashed within immaterial labour. In this activity it is growingly difficult to distinguish
between work time and reproduction or leisure time”. Queer theorist Beatriz Preciado discusses
a very interesting example of this theme, arguing that the first example of leisure and labour
merging in popular media can be seen in Playboy magazine, in which depictions of Hugh
Hefner’s round bed (that was equally his office and play-room) started a whole trend for ideas
and spaces in which leisure and labour began to merge (Preciado, 2010). Language and thought
cannot be put on a halt, computers are both productive machines and providers of games and
entertainment. The intellect is a central element to production, knowledge is amplified by lines
of code and technological equipment designed to connect workers. Being connected is
productive, speech and thought are productive, but what has changed since Fordism is that now
this production is intangible, there is no physical output. Paolo Virno states that “within post-
Fordist organization of production, activity-without-a-finished-work moves from being a special
and problematic case to becoming the prototype of waged labour in general”(Virno, 2003:94).
The work realized by a few specialized workers in the twentieth century has now become
predominant and the model followed by a large proportion of the workforce. Post-autonomist
authors will describe this process as the transformation of the workforce into mass
intellectuality.
French scholar Olivier Blondeau suggested that “the growth of an economy based on
immateriality has led to the ‘immaterialization’ of the means of production. For this reason the
effort of defining fixed boundaries between productive forces and production means can
become a dangerous enterprise”(Blondeau, 2004:35). In that sense the language that circulates
through computers and the language on which these computers run cannot be distinguished. To
a certain extent these infrastructures are as immaterial as the contents that circulate through
them. As Lash and Urry argue, objects have lost their materiality and they have turned into signs
that are exchanged and flow among other signs. Exploring further this notion they argue that
“we shall also see that there are changes as well in the nature of the objects involved in mobility.
They are progressively emptied out of material content” (Lash and Urry, 1993:4). In later
chapters I will explore the French philosopher Michel Serres’ ideas on this respect introducing
the notion of quasi-objects (Serres, 2007:47), that is, entities that generate networks through
circulation.
What is being produced are not material objects but signs. These signs are of two types, “either
they have a primarily cognitive content and are post-industrial or informational goods” (Lash
18
and Urry, 1993:4). These signs are mobile, exchangeable, can be recombined and reproduced
with no cost. The production of signs and language is made by the cooperation of millions of
subjects connected through non-linear networks of production and reproduction. Factories do
not produce signs; these are being constantly produced by the social factory. Work does not
consist in producing those signs but as Virno argues consists “no longer in the carrying out of a
single particular objective, but in the modulating (as well as the varying and intensifying) of
social cooperation, in other words, that ensemble of relations and systemic connections that as
of now are the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth.”(Virno, 2003:94). Work
becomes less a matter of production and increasingly turns into what Nicolas Bourriaud
describes as “postproduction”(2005).
This notion of immaterial labour has received critiques from some notorious scholars such as
Doug Henwood (2003) or Steve Wright (2007), who in both cases have shown how immaterial
production relies heavily on traditional production that has been invisibilized or displaced to so-
called third world countries. Agreeing on this point, we must be cautious with overestimating
the importance of immaterial labour in society, as it can overshadow other forms of production
that are still highly present, but in general terms, we must also acknowledge the steady growth of
immaterial forms of production in contemporary capitalism3. With the growth of industrial
based economies such as the case of China or Brazil it becomes increasingly difficult to defend
that all labour has become immaterial, but still it is worth noting how material and immaterial
forms of labour interact and combine. In the face of the current financial crisis we must note
how a breakdown in a purely speculative system can bring the world to a halt, giving us a fair
idea of the interconnectedness of material and immaterial based economies.
General Intellect
One key theoretical concept that stands at the core of all the accounts on cognitive capitalism is
derived from an intuition formulated by Karl Marx in the Grundrisse, in a small passage named
“Fragment on the Machines4” in which he talks about how collective abstract thinking
materializes in the machines that will later define modes of production. He will refer to this
3
Since 1991 Lazzarato himself has evaluated some of his initial claims and relativized some ideas.
4
The precise fragment reads “Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric
telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed
into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the
human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of
fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of
production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come
under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree
the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as
immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process” (Marx, 2005:697).
19
process as the creation of a ‘general intellect’, that is, abstract knowledge that will guide workers
and the modes of production they follow. This notion has been updated and applied to define
the collective brain, the neuronal network composed by millions of subjects connected by new
technologies and the forms of cooperation that these allow; I will explore the implications of
this concept in the following lines.
Paolo Virno was one of the first scholars to start working on this concept in his early writings,
but he only got to explore the full potential of this notion in a series of papers he wrote during
the nineties, which were later collected in his book Grammar of the Multitude. He writes “in the
‘Fragment on the Machines’ in the Grundrisse, Marx defends what can hardly be called a
‘Marxian’ thesis. He claims that, due to its autonomy from it, abstract knowledge - primarily yet
not only of a scientific nature - is in the process of becoming no less than the main force of
production and will soon relegate the repetitious labour of the assembly line to the fringes. This
is the knowledge objectified in fixed capital and embedded in the automated system of
machinery”(Virno, 2003b:104). This abstract knowledge produced collectively by scientists,
writers, physicians, etc. is what Marx labels ‘general intellect’. Although Marx defines that
general intellect is abstract knowledge, it materializes and appears physically in the shape of the
machines that guide production, in the innovations that drive productivity and in the tools with
which workers will execute their labour. In that sense general intellect organizes production, and
shapes the ways in which workers will operate. Virno helps us define the concept stating that
“general intellect should not necessarily mean the aggregate of the knowledge acquired by the
species, but the faculty of thinking; potential as such, not its countless particular
realizations”(Virno, 2003b:67). This general intellect is composed by “artificial languages,
theorems of formal logic, theories of information and systems, epistemological paradigms,
certain segments of the metaphysical tradition, "linguistic games" and images of the
world”(Virno, 2003:85). So we could state that the general intellect is the product of the human
capability to articulate thought. It’s the combination of years of ideas, discoveries, languages,
and ways of communicating among human beings. In a way we could consider this general
intellect as a knowledge commons from which production can be derived, a virtual of
production, I will explore more thoroughly this notion in the following chapter where I will
focus on the notion of digital commons and its importance in the productive model that shapes
the creative industries.
General intellect remains an abstract entity that materializes in the tools that guide production,
on the codes that run on computers or in the numerous ways in which workers cooperate in
order to accomplish a task. But it would be a mistake to think that general intellect operates only
at the level of tangible machines. All those abstract machines that guide production are
20
constituted by assemblages of ideas, insights and knowledge, help to shape social dynamics. In
that sense Virno points out that “general intellect is the foundation of a social cooperation
broader than that cooperation which is specifically related to labour (...) While the connections
of the productive process are based on a technical and hierarchical division of tasks, the acting
in concert which hinges upon the general intellect moves from common participation to “life of
the mind,” that is, from the preliminary sharing of communicative and cognitive
abilities”(Virno, 2003b:68). So general intellect is the basis on which production, reproduction
and forms of social behaviour rely. It’s a set of conceptual constellations that function as
productive machines. It constitutes the basic protocols that guide production (Galloway, 2006).
General intellect constitutes an ambivalent concept as it includes a notion of wealth, a common
general wealth constituted by the accumulation of knowledge, but also implies the rules that
shape a given mode of production, capitalism. This leads us to another key Marxist notion:
social production, that is, the production generated by the cooperation of workers, thinkers and
social human beings. It is the score that guides and connects individual workers and enables
them to, using Hardt and Negri’s ideas, constitute as a multitude. General intellect includes both
the sources of production and the protocols that shape contemporary immaterial production;
social production refers to the results, the outcome of the productive powers of the general
intellect. It implies a virtuality of production but also the guidelines that enable its actualization.
Social cooperation
The formulation of the theory of general intellect has lead to the development of several strands
of work dealing with the notion of a ‘cooperation of brains’ or, using the Marxist formula,
“social cooperation”. There has been an exponential growth of these forms of cooperation
amplified by technological innovations such as the Internet or a number of other
communication technologies. Acknowledging Marx’s early intuitions, some scholars defend the
idea that the general intellect provides the basis to understand new forms of collective
intelligence that are emerging. One of the first theorists to work on the idea was the French
philosopher Pierre Levy, who in 1994 wrote the book L'intelligence collective. Pour une anthropologie
du cyberspace in which he explored the potential of the internet to connect millions of individual
brains enabling them to cooperate in the production of new inventions and realities. Some
examples cited in the book are developments such as Free Software or Wikipedia, collective
enterprises based on the brainpower provided by thousands of individual brains working
together via the internet. But as we have seen before the general intellect does not just refer to
the ability to cooperate; to some extent it provides the basis for cooperation, it functions as the
common score that enables brains to function together as if they were playing the same tune.
Organic metaphors are used to describe this collective brain. We can see a clear example of this
21
when Franco Berardi “Bifo” argues that “the process of digital production is taking a biological
form which can be likened to an organism: the nervous system of an organization is analogous
with the human nervous system”(Berardi, 2010:35). Brains are connected through digital devices
to each other, in this manner they can be organized but also are able to self-organize, again we
see the ambivalence of cognitive capitalism. In order to enable the cooperation of brains,
Berardi argues that an info-sphere has emerged which “is the interface between the media
system and the mind that receives the signals, the mental ecosphere, that immaterial sphere in
which semiotic fluxes interact with the reception antennae of the minds scattered on the
planet”(Berardi, 2010:39) . Somehow these depictions of brains seem to fail to illustrate
accurately the notion of social cooperation, as cognitive capitalism is not about a disembodied
knowledge, but instead tries to describe the social aspects of knowledge, acts of thought and
affects that cross through bodies, articulations of emotions, ideas, sensations and feelings that
give rise to difference.
Immaterial labour presupposes the existence of this general intellect. Lazzarato reminds us that
“immaterial labour is pre-constituted by an autonomous social work force capable of self-
organization”(1991). This social work force is based on the collective knowledge produced by
what many authors define as ‘mass intellectuality’, that is, a multitude of workers sharing their
brain and affective power. This term, as we will see, does not imply that the whole of society has
turned into intellectuals, but that the cognitive capacities of the social subjects are the basis of
production and capitalist valorisation. And as Damasio (2006) and Capra (1997) have argued we
do not only think with our brains, thought happens all across our bodies. This ‘general social
knowledge’ includes scientific or specialized knowledge as well as all those other forms of
knowledge derived from the social cooperation (discussions, dialogues, rhymes, writings, songs,
etc.) among singular subjects. The social factory is the locus of this social cooperation that has
magnified the productive powers of society and made the factories redundant. Now the
factories just function as organizers of these lines (filiers) of immaterial production.
Paolo Virno argues that with the immaterialization of labour and the emergence of social
production “the tasks of a worker or of a clerk no longer involve the completion of a single
particular assignment, but the changing and intensifying of social cooperation”(2003b:62). The
assembly line is spread across the social realm. Factories are now hubs crossed by these lines,
which they try to organize to extract surplus from different forms of social cooperation. Using
Deleuze’s (1997) concept we could argue that production is now an act of modulation of the
different cognitive and affective flows generated by this extended social factory. Enterprises
seek ways to capture these flows of cooperation, the walls of the factory have become porous.
As Lazzarato points out, production starts now “outside the enterprise, the cooperation among
22
brains is ontologically previous to its capture. In this cooperation a power of co-creation and co-
production is expressed”(Lazzarato, 2006:117). The Italian economist Antonella Corsani has
underscored the limitations of the factory and the Fordist space, and the ways in which this is
superseded by a form of creativity that goes beyond its limited confines. She explains that as
“the explosion of the factory, the distribution of new forms of cooperation within the interstices
created by Fordist business, and, in short, the fact that innovation escapes the control of big
business constitute a new productive reality that must be taken into account” (Corsani, 2004:
91). We can hereby discern that social cooperation is not just an anecdotal or marginal
phenomenon, but rather, that it lies right at the centre of a series of economic and social
transformations that are about to take place on a global scale. This is brilliantly expounded in
the following passage, in which Corsani presents the ways in which this transformation will
affect subjective processes: “if during industrial capitalism subjectivity was to be left behind in
the factory’s lockers, in contemporary capitalism (...) it must be put to work. The passage from
an economy in which invention/innovation was the exception, to one in which
invention/innovation is the norm, entails a passage from spatialised time to the time of
becoming” (Corsani, 2007: 48).
In this new reality the individual subject in Negri’s opinion is transformed into a social subject
which is now “the cornerstone of production and wealth”(1999:131). This leads us to think in
terms of social wealth, that is, the product of the valorization of the ideas, inventions and
innovations derived from forms of social cooperation. The factory pools on these sources of
wealth privatizing and capitalizing on the knowledge produced collectively. Concrete labour has
become social labour and the worker is now linked to the rest of social subjects through his or
her cognitive capacities. Language intertwines social subjects in a fabric which we have defined
as a general intellect. A coalition of brains has taken over production, value is generated from
the accumulation of brains and the collective production of knowledge. However, Virno
reminds us that “the concept of social cooperation, which is so complex and subtle in Marx, can
be thought of in two different ways. There is, first of all, an “objective” meaning: each individual
does different, specific, things which are put in relation to one another by the engineer or by the
factory foreman: cooperation, in this case, transcends individual activity; it has no relevance to
the way in which individual workers function. Secondly, however, we must consider also a
“subjective” notion of cooperation: it materializes when a conspicuous portion of individual
work consists of developing, refining, and intensifying cooperation itself. With post-Fordism the
second definition of cooperation prevails”(Virno, 2003b:63).
Maurizio Lazzarato has explored and given a very precise account of this second way of
conceiving social cooperation. Inspired by the works of Gabriel Tarde and deploying a
23
neomonadic interpretation, the author has explored the social and political implications of
collective intelligence and the emergence of this social brain. He defends that “society functions
in a similar way as a brain, a social brain. The hierarchies of bodily and intellectual functions
(immaterial and reproductive labour, cognitariad and material labour using contemporary
expressions) does not explain contemporary social dynamics, which functions as a ‘big collective
brain’ in which individual brains operate as cells”(Lazzarato, 2006:59). Lazzarato uses the notion
of ‘invention’ to define the output of these articulated brains. We can think invention as
opposed to innovations, which are inventions that have been valorized and introduced into the
market. So the collective brain has the power to invent and to act politically and it functions as
an organic entity that binds society together. Lazzarato adds “inventions are generated through
the natural or accidental collaboration of numerous moving consciences, in Tarde’s opinions,
inventions are fruit of a multi-conscience”(Lazzarato, 2006:61).
Collective intelligence comes as a consequence of the articulation of millions of monads that
function as a unique body. These monads are not fixed or stable entities, but on the contrary,
constitute a flowing reality. These can be hooked on and off from a network that assembles
them. These monads interact through their cognitive and linguistic capacities. They generate
knowledge and public opinion, they are capable of producing inventions and disseminating
them through the social fabric. The internet has been a crucial element for the coordination and
articulation of these monads. Each monad talks to the other emitting signals that will be
catalyzed and sent back and forwards through the internet. As Lazzarato acknowledges “with
the birth of the internet, the power of those captured forces that was held on a standstill by the
unification and homogeneity of analogue networks is set free, other expression machines have
been invented, new regimes of signs have been developed. The power of creation and
realization of possible worlds has been returned to its own indetermination”(2006:162). The
internet has enhanced the general intellect, it has provided the means for coordination of
isolated brains that create and produce collectively. The score is provided, the brains tune in and
generate a polymorphous melody; workers are the new virtuosos, they generate a work without
object; they perform together a complex piece, demonstrating social cooperation at its best.
The dark side of the power derived from the articulation of brains comes in the form of over-
exposure to cognitive stimulus. Berardi has worked extensively on this issue and has provided a
colourful depiction of the maladies and problems derived from the bodily over-exposure to the
info-sphere. He writes: “the conscious and sensitive organism is submitted to a competitive
pressure, to an acceleration of stimuli, to a constant attentive stress. As a consequence, the
mental atmosphere, the info-sphere in which the mind is formed and enters into relations with
other minds, becomes a psychopathogenic atmosphere”(Berardi, 2010:35). Stress, anxiety, panic
24
attacks, ADHD etc. all constitute manifestations of how the body is struggling to deal with the
excessive amount of information it must process. The brain must cope with a constant flow of
signals and stimuli, which on one hand can be transformed into knowledge but on the other can
lead to blockage and exhaustion. Berardi continues “as the stratum of the info-sphere becomes
progressively denser, the informational stimuli invade every atom of human attention.
Cyberspace grows in an unlimited fashion, yet mental time is not infinite”(Berardi, 2010:70).
The individual brain suffers from these overloads, the collective brain continues producing, as
there are always new nodes willing to hook into the info-sphere.
Virtuosity
If general intellect functions as a score, if work has become immaterial, if production is based
on social cooperation, the traditional figure of the worker must be reconceptualized. The worker
that does not produce any tangible outputs differs greatly from the Fordist worker whose
productivity was quantified analyzing his output. These are some of the reasons that lead Paolo
Virno to introduce the figure of the virtuoso, a performer who follows with great precision a
given score but when he or she finishes the work does not leave any tangible outputs behind.
The virtuoso puts his skills to work, cooperates with the rest of the orchestra and follows a
score with great accuracy, affects the audiences through a temporary performance that will not
last in time. The virtuoso produces difference through repetition, he introduces small variations
each time he executes the score. Virno gathers inspiration from Glen Gould, the virtuoso
pianist, and the way he gave perfect performances that could only been heard once, as he would
never repeat a composition exactly. As Gould, the contemporary virtuoso performs his activity
in a public space, the republic of brains and bodies that cooperate following the guidelines
provided by the general intellect.
In Virno’s description of contemporary labour the virtuoso is affected by a number of maladies
that are forged in the anvil of flexibility, discontinuity and precariousness that define work in the
age of cognitive capitalism. In one of his best know articles titled “The Ambivalence of
Disenchantment” this philosopher points out several of these states of mind: opportunism,
cynicism, fear and disenchantment. In his own words “opportunism, fear, and cynicism-
resounding in the postmodern proclamation of the end of history - enter into production, or
rather, they intertwine with the versatility and flexibility of electronic technologies.”(Virno,
2003:46). The need of constant mutability becomes an imperative that must be followed by all
workers, and this comes with a cost. The worker must live in a state of constant anxiety, looking
for new opportunities and new sources of income. The worker performs as a virtuoso but faces
discontinuity, uncertainty and precariousness. These are some of the reasons that transform the
25
cognitive worker into an “opportunist that confronts a flux of interchangeable possibilities,
keeping open as many as possible, turning at the closest and swerving unpredictably from one to
the other”(Virno, 2003:50). All doors must be kept open, all balls kept in the air; there is always
a chance to network, to start a new project or tap into a new source of funding. Wages do not
define the life of the virtuoso, the virtuoso relies on each independent performance to make a
living. In that sense “opportunism is a game with no time-outs and no finish line”(2003:50),
opportunism becomes almost an obligation. You must always be there, following the score,
waiting for the next project to arrive, investing in yourself, improving your social capital,
searching for new opportunities and opening new niche markets.
Fear kicks in, the fear of not making it, to lose the next possible contract, the fear of not being
able to update one’s skills and master the next technology. Fear and opportunism go hand in
hand. In this scenario insecurity becomes a prevalent emotion. Will the performance be as good
as the last one? Will the audience want more? Will the performer be able to keep up with the
newcomers? The virtuoso must live in a constant state of vigilance and must be capable of
adapting his tune to any given change in the score; the rhythm can be altered in any moment
and the virtuoso must be able to speed-up his performance or slow it down if needed. As Virno
states insecurity becomes a prevalent emotion, the “insecurity about one’s place during periodic
innovations, the fear of losing recently gained privileges, and the anxiety of being ‘left-behind’
translate into flexibility, adaptability and a readiness to reconfigure oneself”(Virno, 2003:51).
The virtuoso becomes an adaptable and flexible being, but also a cynical and ambivalent subject.
These are some of the contradictions and states of mind that affect the contemporary worker.
In following chapters I will deepen the analysis of the states of mind and anxieties that affect
cultural workers in chapter five, showing how the notion of happiness, creativity and
authenticity shape cultural production, I will argue that creative workers are the undisputed
virtuosos of contemporary work.
The other side to virtuosity is depression, that is, the exhaustion of the competitive subject, the
opportunist who can no longer face rivalry and the constant need to be part of the social arena.
Virno talks about the disenchantment that affects the virtuoso after he or she realizes how futile
their activity can be. Berardi continues this line of thought and adds “it is not surprising that
depression is spreading at a time when an entrepreneurial and competitive ideology is becoming
dominant. Since the beginning of the 1980s, after the defeat of the working class movements
and the affirmation of neoliberal ideology, the idea that we should all be entrepreneurs has
gained social recognition”(Berardi, 2010:119). This depression is bred in the need to always be
there, in the need to be constantly connected in order to be productive. You must receive and
process continuously an immense and growing mass of data. This provokes a constant attentive
26
stress, “a reduction of the time available for affectivity” (Berardi, 2010:42). The virtuoso must
deal with this pressure as he follows the score provided by the general intellect.
Value
One of the characteristic traits that define the functioning of cognitive capitalism is that the
classical laws of value have been completely surpassed by regimes of production based on social
cooperation. If Marx did formulate a law of value as such (an issue that has been widely debated,
see Caffentzis 2005), authors such as Toni Negri have challenged some of the basic assumptions
that underlie Marx’s notions of value. To start with, Negri argues that in the Marxist orthodox
“labour can only be understood as waged labour” (Negri, 2001:23), so value can only be
produced through the exploitation of waged labour. Another problem Negri encounters in
Marx’s laws is that value is always in direct relation (and can only be accomplished) within the
law of “surplus value” (2001:53), so we find an intricate relationship of quantities of labour
which have been extracted from the workers, which come to be valorised once they are
crystallised as surplus value. However what remains the central point of Marx’s laws of value is
that “the laws of value are always the laws of labour power” (Negri, 1999:119), and this will
remain essential to the theory. From a Marxist point of view, what is extracted from the workers
is their “use value” which needs to be transformed into “exchange value” in order to gain
surplus value from the workers’ labour (2001: 84). This is why work (waged labour) and only
work, becomes the raw source of value (2001: 86) from a Marxist perspective. So the role of the
capitalist is to extract more value than that he has invested in order to gain profits and this
constitutes the nature of exploitation (2001:96).
From this point of view, it makes sense that “work can only be productive if it has been
integrated into capital” (Negri, 2001:93), because only capital can close the circle which will
provide economic benefits in return for the “exchange value” extracted from the workers as
work power. Money is then a universal objectification of labour time (2001:47) and is “the
natural medium in which we can find exchange value, once it has been transformed into its
universal determination” (2001:47). So money just constitutes the final step and accomplishment
of the natural course set by the law of value from a Marxist perspective, and is the entity in
charge of socializing capital (2001:36), because ultimately money will “organize social relations”
(2001:38). Marx also notes that the sign of value, money, will finally be perceived and take over
as value in itself, so the sign will eventually be as important as the element it signifies.
One of Negri’s main arguments is that although we still need to take into account that “the
incommensurability of value does not eliminate work as its main source” (Negri, 1999:86), at
27
present it is increasingly impossible to distinguish between productive and non-productive
labour, between material and immaterial labour, or between production and circulation
(1999:92), so a broader definition of labour should be put forward if we intend to actualize
Marx’s law of value. In a similar line, another point Negri makes is that while Marx considers
that value is extracted from the workers through the work time, we live in a moment in which
“the time of life has become productive time” (1999: 122); that is, the limits of work and the
limits of life have become increasingly blurred. Following the discussion posed previously, how
do you valorise all the time one spends talking, being connected, networking or simply
imagining things? How can you determine the economic value of the minute contributions that
each individual brain offers to a linguistic system? When work becomes cognitive cooperation,
how do you quantify the amount of time one has spent discussing, thinking, chatting or
repeating an idea? These are serious problems that defy some of the basic assumptions in Marx’s
notion of value. These are some of the reasons that lead Negri to talk about the extinction of
the law of value (1999: 121) and refer to the social body as a source of value. By doing so he
breaks with the more orthodox approaches to understanding value within Marxism.
Obviously not all the Marxist scholars agree with Negri’s critique or believe in the extinction of
Marx’s law of value. Some, such as the social thinker and member of The Midnight Notes
Collective, George Caffentzis, makes it clear that this extinction can not be possible, as he
argues that Marx never even formulated such a law. According to Caffentzis Marx never worked
specifically on defining a general law of value - he developed several approaches to the theme
but never defined them as a general law (Caffentzis, 2005: 89). He argues that “there are many
explicitly stated laws (e.g., the law of the tendency of the falling rate of profit, the general law of
capitalist accumulation) and many explicitly identified values (e.g., use-value, exchange-value,
surplus value) in Marx’s texts, but there is little evidence of a Law of Value” (Caffentzis, 2005:
90).
Shifting beyond this starting point of the discussion Caffentzis seems to share similar points of
view with Negri, and he agrees that with the “real subsumption” the notions of value “explode”
(Caffentzis, 2005: 105). Although this is not a reason in Caffentzis’ view to reject Karl Marx’s
theories, the author seems to believe that with the intensification of capitalism new forms of
value need to emerge, and although the fact that our current value instruments seem to be
outdated, it does not necessarily imply that things can no longer be valued; the problem is to
redefine a system to measure such abstract indicators. Caffentzis goes on asking “But how does
one prove that something is immeasurable? One thing that the history of mathematics teaches is
that such proof claims have often proven false” (Caffentzis, 2005: 101).
28
Caffentzis and Negri seem to differ on one crucial point. Negri argues that there has been a
historical evolution of capitalism which has pushed it from a stage of formal subsumption to
our current situation in which a real subsumption of society by capital has been accomplished,
so endorsing the theory of immaterial labour. Negri claims that contemporary production is
based on social cooperation. Caffentzis does not completely agree with Negri on this point and
argues that “the moment of real subsumption had already occurred in modern industry along
with the allied value phenomena: increasing relative surplus value creation, increasing organic
composition differentials, and increasing deviation of prices of production from values. These
tendencies were common phenomena in the mid-19th century as well as in the beginning of the
21st century” (Caffentzis, 2005: 106). With this Caffentzis breaks with Negri’s teleological vision
of the development of capital and proposes a less linear approach to the discussion. He believes
that the tension between formal and real subsumption is an active and ongoing process, not a
transition between evolutionary stages. He goes on to argue that “General Intellect” and
“immaterial labor” are not invitations to go beyond capital, as Negri and Hardt claim, but rather
have always been part of the work capital has exploited whether it was waged or not”
(Caffentzis, 2005: 106). That is, we can find the main indicators of post-Fordist capitalism in its
early stages, so they have always been a condition of capital which has now been intensified. He
goes on further stating that even Marx was aware of this tension, “though Marx clearly believed
that (…)“real subsumption” (…) becomes more dominant than the first (formal subsumption),
it never becomes a totality as long as capitalism continues to exist because of the crises
associated with the Falling Rate of Profit” (Caffentzis, 2005: 107). And this duality, the co-
existence of two very different ways of functioning, do not become contradictory in Caffentzis
views but are and always have been one of the characteristics of capitalism.
Paolo Virno also challenges some of the basic assumptions that lie at the foundation of classical
political economy. Traditionally value was a consequence of the effects of the law of supply and
demand. Virno puts into question this idea in the context cognitive capitalism defined not by
scarcity of raw material (knowledge and information) but on its abundance. He claims that “to a
certain extent abundance ridicules the supposed nature of the laws of supply and demand,
reducing the labour market to a scientific utopia” (Virno, 2003: 120). With the emergence of
non-rival abundant goods, the ways in which labour is valorized must be radically altered. We
cannot try to measure the value of social production using a dated toolkit. As an example of
this, Virno introduces an extremely suggestive notion: the idea of exodus. He talks about the
problems of accumulation that affected the United States when the first colonizers arrived there.
Marx couldn’t understand why even if they had commodities, labour-power, factories and
money, the capitalist class didn’t manage to accumulate enough to grow their enterprises. The
solution of this problem came when he understood that in many cases, as soon as workers had
29
accumulated a small amount of capital from the wages they received working in a factory, they
would abandon the towns to settle in the west. These workers would flee the factories and start-
up small farms and enterprises in the middle of the great American prairies. The cycle of
accumulation was never accomplished as there wasn’t a frontier to keep the workers in place.
Virno suggests that we are now again living a moment in which these artificial boundaries have
been lifted and the abundance of goods and raw material provide a direct challenge to the
systems of accumulation previously known. In that sense, we need to reconceptualize notions of
wealth and value in order to fully grasp the possibilities put forward by the immaterialization of
the economy. The raw material that fuels cognitive capitalism is comprised by information that
can be processed into knowledge and non-rival goods. Any limit to information is just an
artificial barrier, scarcity is an artificial imposition established in order to valorize an abundant
and ever growing source of information.
Intellectual Property
The tool established to capture the value derived from intangible assets and to limit the uses of
the fruits of social cooperation is intellectual property (IP). This convention helps to construct a
false idea of scarcity aimed at restricting the circulation of signs, ideas and other constellations
of knowledge. If, as we have proven, intangible or informational assets constitute non-rival
goods, the only way to pretend they are scarce entities with a limited use is by constructing an
artificial framework that surrounds these goods, and this is how IP operates. This legal artefact
re-singularizes collective endeavours, it breaks down the flows of collective cooperation and
determines a specific author that should be remunerated as if he or she were the true creators of
that portion of knowledge. The immanent power bred from the articulation of brains becomes
objectified in a piece of private property.
Intellectual property has risen in importance and strength with the arrival of cognitive
capitalism. In Fordist or industrial capitalism it had a limited scope of use, industrial property
(namely patents) was important but not central to production. The clear investment was made in
the means of production: factories, cranes, tools, etc. were all expensive and indispensable assets
that demarcated a clear line between the capitalist and the workers. Knowing how to assemble a
car didn´t determine you could assemble your own cars; knowing the plot of a film did not
imply you could reproduce the film. The materiality of the products of the Fordist era was the
real limit to their possession. As Lazzarato points out “the neutralization and capture of the
power of co-creation and co-production are based on IP and not in the ownership of the means
of production, which determined how value was captured from the cooperation that took place
in the factories”(Lazzarato, 2006:119). With the immaterialization of the economy and the
30
centrality of knowledge as the main resource for production IP becomes a central regulatory
element for a number of corporate activities such as IT, bio-technology, industrial and fashion
design, journalism, chemistry and the pharmaceutical industry, media and communication, and
the creative industries as a whole to name just a few. As with any law, IP implies violence, the
violence of limiting access to certain forms of knowledge, the violence of limiting the uses one
can give to a certain entity, the violence of deciding who should know something and who
shouldn’t (or rephrasing this point, who has sufficient funds to access information and who
hasn’t). In this sense Lazzarato argues that “IP has a political function, as it determines who has
the right to create and who has the right to reproduce. IP separates the multitude from its ability
to create problems and provide solutions to these problems”(Lazzarato, 2006:121). So IP
functions on a double level, it constitutes an economic instrument and a political reality, it works
as a regulator for the market and as a social mediator. It decides who can access knowledge and
what can be done with that knowledge.
Only in understanding the importance of IP in the midst of cognitive capitalism can we fully
grasp the role that brands have acquired. Brands function as indicators of ownership and as
points of singularization (Lury, 2004). Brands are the quintessential economic and aesthetic
object of cognitive capitalism. Branding is the moment in which undetermined flows and signs
produced collectively become determined economic elements. A brand determines that the
work done by the many belongs to the few. Brands are signs that signify property, they establish
who, where and how an intangible asset can be used. As Lash and Urry remark: “these objects
circulate and they undergo a juridical operation to become intellectual property. In most cases
these objects then further undergo branding, another aesthetic operation carried out either by
advertising agencies or by culture industries’ stars themselves” (Lash & Urry, 1993:113). The
creative industries have a very important role to play in the whole branding process as they
provide the aesthetics, the sounds, shapes and colours that configure the brand. The creative
industries aesthetize the inherent violence that underlines the act of branding. The creative
industries generate logos, jingles and mascots that ameliorate the legal framework that inhabits
the act of branding. They generate a coherent aesthetics to hide the incoherencies of intellectual
property. The creative industries help to define authorship of collectively produced entities. This
is an important point because subscribing what Lash and Urry argue I believe that the “ordinary
manufacturing industry is becoming more and more like the production of culture. It is not that
commodity manufacture provides the template and culture follows, but that the culture
industries themselves have provided the template” (1993:123). In the following chapter I will
explore fully the relation between the creative industries and intellectual property by analyzing
the role of the contemporary or digital commons for the creation of wealth in contemporary
capitalism. If we have argued that the General Intellect constitutes the raw material from which
31
social production can tap into and over which it can collaborate, intellectual property constitutes
the limits to cooperation. Intellectual property sets the artificial boundaries and gateways that
enable the access to the common pool of shared resources that lies at the base of contemporary
production.
Common Goods
If we have determined that production in cognitive capitalism occurs as a result of the
articulation and cooperation of brains, if labour has become immaterial and the results of labour
are intangible assets, we should reformulate the nature of these ‘things’ produced collectively.
Intellectual property provides a legal framework within which to impose a false sense of scarcity
on the signs, ideas and inventions generated collectively. This artificial restriction of the uses and
ownership of intangible assets seems a desperate attempt to control the power unleashed from
the connection of a multitude of brains assisted by digital networks. Some authors have
suggested that we should refer to these commodities as ‘common goods’ as a way of returning
to the social those goods generated collectively. As Maurizio Lazzarato states, “differing from
the cooperation that took place in the Smithian or Marxist factory, the cooperation amongst
brains produces common goods: knowledge, language, science, art, services, information,
etc.”(2006:129), which in all cases constitute examples of non-rival goods that can be shared and
used collectively. These common goods elude ownership in the same way they escape from any
form of authorship. They are mutable and unstable entities that can be reformulated, expanded,
reshaped, resignified and reassembled. Shared knowledge is more valuable than isolated ideas.
As Lazzarato points out “common goods do not get lost once they are exchanged, they do not
disappear when being socialized. On the opposite, their value grows in the moment they are
shared collectively”(Lazzarato, 2006:130). The more people use these goods, the more their
value grows. The dissemination of ideas makes them valuable, and this is the logic that underlies
common goods.
Common goods break the public/private dichotomy, as they do not fit easily in either of these
two categories. These goods are a result of a “non-state public cooperation”(Lazzarato,
2006:131). These are forms of knowledge that have not been produced either in the factory or
in public institutions but have been produced in a republic of social cooperation, and as such
they belong to a multitude of cooperating brains. Public goods are public but aren’t publicly
managed. They cannot be owned, only used and deployed. Production and reproduction of
public goods is the basis of their existence; each time these goods are put into circulation (each
time a language is spoken, an intuition formulated, a song sang etc.) these goods are both
produced and reproduced, enhanced and distorted. Intellectual property can attempt to fix
32
meanings, to stabilize and close possible meanings of these public goods transforming them into
private assets. By doing so they risk losing value, they lose the inherent power that constitute
them. When common goods are transformed into public or private commodities these find new
ways of entering the commons. In the following chapter I will explore the notion of the
commons seeing to what extent we can talk about digital or knowledge commons and how this
paradigm relates to the creative industries.
From what we have seen until now, we can deduce that the rules that governed the economy in
the Fordist era, the principles that guided production, have been radically altered. Following
Lazzarato we can sustain that “if economy is the science that looks after the optimum allocation
of scarce goods, and if nowadays scarcity is not a natural condition any longer but a byproduct
of a legal system, we should settle the foundations for a new way of conceiving wealth following
the logic of abundance and common goods” (2006:131). In this sense the notions of value,
production, wealth, reproduction, commodity, work or leisure have been all challenged. It is in
this new paradigm that we must search for the origins of the creative industries, an economic
sector that -as we will see in following chapters- was designed from above and which epitomizes
many of the discussions put forward in this chapter.
Creative Industries
Throughout this work I will attempt to aruge that we must consider the creative industries as a
workshop in which the dynamics that define cognitive capitalism are continually rehearsed. I am
not claiming that the creative industries have established a blueprint that has been followed later
by other industrial sectors; it would be easy to find different genealogies of the origin of
cognitive capitalism going way beyond the definition of the “cultural industry” proposed by
Adorno and Horkheimer. Instead I believe that many of the schemes, subjective modes and
ways of thinking that contemporary labour now experiences have been previously put into
practice or promoted with the help of the creative industries. The work regimes that define the
ways in which the creative industries function, characterized by great amounts of flexibility,
discontinuity, self-accountability and uncertainty, are now becoming the model to be deployed
in the rest of the economy. There is no better place to experiment with immaterial labour than
in a series of practices that produce immaterial products. Paolo Virno holds a similar point of
view when he argues that “the matrix of post-Fordism can be found in the industrial sectors in
which there is “production of communication by means of communication”; hence, in the
culture industry”(Virno, 2003b:56). Virno has no doubts about the importance of the cultural
and creative industries as the sector in which some of the dynamics that define post-Fordism
were first forged. In subsequent chapters I will examine the evolution of the relations between
33
culture and economy, going from the notion of the cultural industry to the more current idea of
the creative industries. My aim is to see how all the ideas we have explored until this moment
are clearly present in this field: immaterial labour, new forms of value, intellectual property, the
figure of the virtuoso (which displays opportunism, cynicism, disenchantment and precarity),
forms of social cooperation, but more importantly, I want to establish a clear relation between
the economic models devised to exploit culture and the digital and immaterial commons.
The creative industries have specialized in managing signs, creating symbols, in developing new
languages and exploring aesthetics, but more importantly I will argue that these practices have
specialized in designing apparatus of capture aimed at tapping into forms of social cooperation.
The aim of the creative industries is to capture common forms of knowledge and transform
them into commodities. The virtuous circle consists in tapping into streams of social
cooperation, capturing common ideas, privatizing them to later sell them and introduce them
into the ‘social imaginaire’ (Flichy, 2007). Virno ratifies this idea and states that “virtuosity
becomes labor for the masses with the onset of a culture industry”(Virno, 2003b:56). In the
following chapters I will explore the different subjective figures this virtuoso adopts analyzing
the role of entrepreneurship, opportunism and precarity in the creative industries.
The model I will disclose in the following work functions through the capture of common
knowledge and its transformation into serialized goods. Books, t-shirts, movies, CDs, etc.,
constitute the physical evidence of common knowledge embedded into tangible objects. These
are valorized by imposing a false sense of ownership; the introduction of intellectual property
guarantees (or at least tries to) a direct link that relates the object to its creator. The songs
contained in the CD, the story ingrained in the book or the logotype that gives value to the shirt
all share in common that fact that they are intangible assets regulated by IP legislations. In this
sense the cultural industries have established a business model later to be followed by other
industrial sectors. Virno points out that “within the culture industry, even in its archaic
incarnation examined by Benjamin and Adorno, one can grasp early signs of a mode of
production which later, in the post-Ford era, becomes generalized and elevated to the rank of
canon”(Virno, 2003b:58). Possibly because of this he has not a problem in accepting that the
cultural industry “was the starting point of a post-Fordist mode of production as a
whole”(Virno, 2003b:58). We could argue that currently the creative industries are the industry
that produces new modes of production and provide a framework for production that will later
be followed by a number of other industrial sectors. In this line Virno writes “the culture
industry produces (regenerates, experiments with) communicative procedures, which are then
destined to function also as means of production in the more traditional sectors of our
contemporary economy”(Virno, 2003b: 62). This is the reason I consider that it is so important
34
to analyze this sector with this theoretical framework in mind, we cannot understand the
creative industries without understanding the general transformations taking place in the
economy that we have defined as the advent of cognitive capitalism. In the following chapter I
will discuss the main discourses and policies that have been articulated and shaped the creative
industries, looking into some of the business models they have promoted.
35
Chapter Two.
The Creative Industries as a New
Economic Paradigm
36
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-Changes
Don't want to be a richer man
Changes by David Bowie
In chapter one I have discussed the general social and economic framework, cognitive
capitalism, in which the creative industries have emerged. I will now work on the discursive
history of this sector, looking at the institutions, policies and narratives that have favoured the
emergence of this economic reality. Acknowledging that some authors even doubt the existence
of the creative industries (Van Osten, 2007), we might still agree on the existence of a set of
institutions, policies, discourses and practices that shape this economic reality. In that sense I am
interested in discussing the different narratives and policies that have been devised in different
contexts in order to accomplish a similar aim: extract value and wealth from cultural and
creative practices. To do so I will first compare three key concepts: the culture industry, the
cultural industries and the creative industries and see how they have been deployed as economic
and social models in different contexts. These conceptual instances will function as the
discursive framework from which policies, institutions, agencies and plans will later develop.
The latter will differ ostensibly from city to city and from nation to nation; these differences are
crucial to understand the normative, economic and social implications of different discourses
that have very specific origins, as I will show throughout this chapter. To understand these
differences I have done most of my field work in Spain and in some Latin American countries,
such as Mexico or Brazil. To structure this chapter I will draw a chronology of events in which
an economic model that was first promoted in the UK has shifted and been promoted in other
European countries, to be finally implemented in developing countries (when its viability is
being put into question in the UK). I will also formulate a critique of some of the basic
assumptions that are central to the theories that promote the creative industries, which take the
cultural commons or the creative basins for granted, not knowing or understanding the rules,
protocols and needs of the ecosystem on which they feed. Finally I will introduce some case
studies that show how following a neoliberal logic, some of the enterprises born under these
policies have shifted from being content producers to become service providers that envisage
the state as a market niche to exploit. But before addressing this issue let us explore the
discursive and institutional history of the creative industries.
37
The Culture Industry
The concept of “the culture industry” was developed by two of the most influential scholars of
the Frankfurt School: Thodor Adorno and Max Horheimer. In the year 1944 these Marxist
thinkers wrote one of the key critiques of contemporary culture, the book Dialectic of
Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno 2007) in which they denounce a negative dialectic that is
shaping society; the same logic that had freed men from the superstitions and fears of medieval
Europe are now the tools with which culture is being rationalized and industrialized, the
dialectic of Enlightenment “turned emancipation into domination. Enlightenment's enabling
power was changed into a new darkness of power as domination”(Lash and Lury, 2007:2). Craft
was being replaced by industrial techniques, culture was being produced following the same
routines as any other mass produced commodities. To describe this new reality they coined the
expression “the culture industry5”, a harsh critique on what they considered was the loss of the
autonomy of culture, of its political articulation. Culture was now being serialized and
transformed into a form of leisure for the masses, it was just a means for enjoyment, a vehicle
for ideology. Culture is marketed as an apolitical entity, as a way of masking the ideology it is
transmitting, that of the capitalist free market. As what happened in Nazi Germany, culture was
reduced to being a tool for propaganda. In a later work titled Culture Industry Reconsidered (Adorno
2001) the philosopher clarifies the concepts they had deployed several years before when they
wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment, saying “we spoke of ‘mass culture’, but we replaced the
expression with ‘culture industry’ in order to exclude from the outset the interpretation
agreeable to its advocates: that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously
from the masses themselves”(Adorno, 2001:98). By writing this Adorno makes it clear that they
were addressing a production system aimed at the masses and not a social form of producing
culture, this was a system devised from above that had to cater for mass consumers who had
very little to say; social production is not contemplated in this description of the culture
industry. The notion of the masses these authors deploy describes a homogeneous conglomerate
of undifferentiated, apolitical and easily influenced consumers 6 constantly hit by the messages
and hidden discourses of the culture industry. These are only divided into categories, they are
never singular elements as this social composition lacks qualification.
Conscious of the controversies that the use of industry in this context could stir, Adorno writes
that ‘the expression industry is not to be taken literally. It refers to the standardization of the
thing itself (…) and to the rationalization of distribution techniques”(Adorno 2001, 100). He
5Note that it is written in a singular and not plural tense.
6We will have to wait for the birth of cultural studies and their work on consumption in order to re-
address the audience as an active agent.
38
justifies this decision as at the time they wrote their book “Movies and radio need no longer
pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to
justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. They call themselves industries; and when their
directors' incomes are published, any doubt about the social utility of the finished products is
removed”(Adorno & Horkheimer,2007, 134). One of the consequences derived of this process
of commoditization of culture is that high and low culture merge into a singular reality, now
these two dimensions of culture are transformed into a single flow of cultural commodities mass
produced and industrially distributed, this is to the “detriment of both” (Adorno 2001, 98). In
their views, high culture has lost its core components and its aesthetic ideals have been turned
into mere stylistic tropes. High art has now been turned into a set of objects and shapes easily
digested by large audiences who need identifiable and simple patterns. The clearest example of
this is Jazz, which in their views characterizes the quintessential evils of the culture industry.
As a consequence of technical developments, any given cultural event can be turned into a
serialized and reproducible object. In this process, its edges are smoothened down and its
critical standpoints are erased. After, it will be packaged and marketed, ready to be distributed
and consumed. All this process overshadows the ideology that lies at the core of the cultural
industry. It hides a belief in technological development as a means of social evolution. There is a
belief in technical rationality which “is the rationale of domination itself”(Adorno &
Horkheimer,2007, 134). The market then divides consumers into consumer groups, these
divisions are based on taste, interests, needs or creeds, settling the basis for an arithmetic of the
subject. Consumers lose their critical vision and compulsively shop and purchase cultural objects
depending on the role they are designed to play. Then “everybody must behave (as if
spontaneously) in accordance with his previously determined and indexed level, and choose the
category of mass product turned out for his type”(2007,136).
These authors offer a pessimistic depiction of a society dominated by an elite that has the
technical means to mass manipulate citizens in order to perpetuate their domination.
Consumers are presented as dummies that acquire those objects that the ruling classes have
decided they should enjoy beforehand. The intellectual qualities of the masses become eroded,
“the stunting of the mass-media consumer's powers of imagination and spontaneity does not
have to be traced back to any psychological mechanisms; he must ascribe the loss of those
attributes to the objective nature of the products themselves, especially to the most
characteristic of them, the sound film”(2007, 139). The industry described by Horkheimer and
Adorno is controlled by a few large corporations who decide and produced the cultural objects
that will later be consumed by tasteless masses, this is a pyramidal model in which knowledge is
concentrated in a few active elements that provide for passive consumers of culture. The
39
cultural industry designs lifestyles, desires, values and aims, Hollywood builds the sets and the
scenes where all these desires come into place. It illustrates the ways in which one should love,
hate and sets the limits to ones aspirations. Hollywood is a moralizing machine and a producer
of desiring subjectivities. Society’s winners and losers are designed and portrayed in the movies,
“the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success”(Adorno & Horkheimer,2007,
146), and linear models of life are portrayed.
The culture industry reproduced the dominant ideology that relies on a very specific mode of
production, capitalism. In this sense it comes not as a surprise that “the system of the culture
industry comes from the more liberal industrial nations, and all its characteristic media, such as
movies, radio, jazz, and magazines flourish there. Its progress, to be sure, had its origin in the
general laws of capital”(Adorno & Horkheimer,2007:145). Entertainment and fun help workers
to get distracted from the true aims of the culture industry: make the Fordist mode of
production more bearable and erase antagonism from the social sphere. What people don’t
realize is that “amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work”(2007, 150). This
seems to precede some of the ideas we discussed in the first chapter when analyzing cognitive
capitalism. Possibly, as Virno argued, the culture industry constitutes the first movement of a
transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. It establishes some of the traits that will later on
become characteristic of cognitive capitalism. But the Frankfurt School theorists are still
describing a Fordist productive model. They are still defining a system dominated from above
by large corporations and in which power is still conceived as a top-down element. The
production of desires and subjectivities that take place in television serials, movies and pulp
literature will no doubt become a common trait of cognitive capitalism, but as Lash and Lury
state “things have now moved on”(2007:3). As in the culture industry, fame and success are
constantly mobilized as subjective dispositions in the contemporary creative industries, but the
production mechanisms and forms of power that underlie these models have changed
substantially. The culture industry, a term devised to critique a series of changes in the way
production functions fail to acknowledge the social dimension of cultural production, but
provides a clear depiction of the transition from Fordism to post-Fordisms, frames a series of
changes that will progressively affect not only the ways in which culture is produced, but the
ways in which the economy will function.
The Cultural Industries
The British scholar David Hesmondhalgh argues that at the end of the seventies the term
‘culture industry’ “was picked up by French sociologists (most notably Morin, 1962; Huel et al.
1978; Miège, 1979), and by activists and policy makers and was converted to the term ‘cultural
40
industries’”(Hesmondhalgh, 2007:15). By doing so they wanted to move away from the negative
qualities the concept inherited from the Frankfurt School and wanted to show that on the
contrary to what Adorno and Horkheimer argued, this was not a monolithic industry but it
covered an array of different practices and business models. These industries comprised sectors
such as “television (including cable and satellite), radio, cinema, newspaper, magazine and book
publishing, the music recording and publishing industries, advertising and the performing arts”
(Hesmondhalgh ,2007:12). Morin and Miège also contributed to define culture as an element of
economic growth; it held the potential to alter the economic models followed up until now and
opened new economic opportunities in those cities and towns wise enough to uncover the
economic potential held in culture and heritage. Apparently this new sector was flexible and
sustainable and could replace the decaying heavy industries that were under constant threat of
the neoliberal discursive attacks (which translated into the delocation of a big number of these
industries) that were coming into place in Europe and North-America. “The faith in the
economic potential of culture constituted a response to the downturn in capitalism in the 1970s
by beginning to look away from traditional manufacturing industries and towards new sectors,
in order to restore profit and productivity levels. The cultural industries were one of the key
sectors they turned to; telecommunications and computers were others” (Hesmondhalgh,
2007:9).
By the time these ideas about the economic importance of culture where consolidating, policy
was starting to introduce measures to promote this reality. The Scottish sociologist Andrew
Ross acknowledges that at that time there was a growing political consensus that “assumed that
culture-based enterprise can be promoted as a driver of economic development for cities,
regions and nations that want to keep up, catch up, or be left out of the knowledge society
(Ross, 2011:19). This idea becomes quite clear in a policy document put forward by the Policy
Studies Institute in 1988 under the name of ‘The Economic Importance of the Arts in Britain’ in
which it states that the arts have an incredible potential as economic drivers, as:
- The arts form a significant economic sector in their own right, with an annual turnover
of £10 million.
- The arts give employment to some 496 000 people
- The arts are an expanding sector of the economy
- The arts are a high value-added sector of the economy
- The arts provide spin-off into other industries
- The arts stimulate tourism
- The arts are a potent means of sustaining employment
- The arts are a cost-effective means of job creation
41
- The arts are a catalyst of urban renewal (Myerscough, 1988:148)
At the same moment in time there was a displacement of industrial production to countries in
which cheap labour was abundant and regulations were less robust or nonexistent. Polluting
industries were pushed away from the city centres and a great portion of industrial activity that
up till now had constituted important economic motors in the development of Europe, USA or
Australia were now taking place overseas. Factories, coal-mines, shipyards etc. were under threat
of major redundancy schemes or faced complete closures. Many cities were being taken over by
the tertiary sector, that along with the financial economy emerged as economic replacements in
European cities. It is in this context that art, architecture or culture were presented as the
solution and functioned as the avant-garde of the service-based economy, attacking the weak
defences that the working classes had erected around their neighbourhoods or workplaces
which later were transformed into shopping malls, cultural hubs or leisure spaces 7. Major
campaigns to save architectural or urban heritage were deployed and the cultural reasons to save
these spaces were suddenly replaced by economic reasons: ‘restoration pays’ or ‘conservation as
development’ were some of the slogans that emerged from these movements which gave a clear
idea of how public spaces were devised as sources of wealth. This triggered a first wave of
privatization of the public space.
The cultural industries provided a cultural facade to social and economic decisions, glossing
over conflicts and promising returns to whoever was ready to culturize their business. These
new industries could also ameliorate the severe unemployment that by the mid-eighties affected
some of the most important European capitals (Mollona 2005). Back then the cultural industries
still consisted in big vertical organizations that functioned under Fordist modes of production
and were comprised of publishing companies, television and broadcasting enterprises, cinema
studios, record labels, etc. As Bagdikian (2000) has shown, the cultural industries tended to form
monopolies and big industrial clusters that generated non-distributive and centralized forms of
wealth - these were still slow and relatively stable enterprises. In this sense we have to interpret
the cultural industries as late Fordist infrastructures aimed at extracting value from cultural
goods. These could be private or publicly owned (publishing houses or national heritage
elements), and their production mode was still characterized by serialization (books, records,
clothes) and mass appeal (big museums of cultural spaces aimed at attracting tourism) of cultural
goods, but in all cases, they were still dependent on tangible assets (cultural objects, buildings,
7 The best accounts of this process in Madrid and Barcelona can be read in the book Madrid ¿la suma de
todos? (VVAA, 2007) or Barcelona marca registrada (VVAA, 2004). There is also an extremely amusing
fragment on this process which took place in New York in (Ross 1994), examining the movie
‘Ghostbusters’ he describes the process of privatization and tertiarization that changed the face of the
American city.
42
actors etc.). Policies designed to promote the cultural industries still relied on big productive
infrastructures and promotion by big cultural conglomerates. This only started to change when
immaterial assets were detected as productive elements.
Interestingly in the UK the cultural industries were first promoted and used as a growth strategy
by the GLC which in the mid-1980s started the Cultural Industries Unit in order to regulate the
sector (see Lewis, 1990,33). At the time this administrative body was in the hands of the
Socialist Party of Great Britain and constituted one of the only political institutions to have
escaped the reach of neoliberalism and Thatcher’s influence. Together with the Greater London
Enterprise Board (GLEB) during the eighties they published some of the most relevant policy
briefings and documents that shaped and gave the conditions to the development of the cultural
industries as we know then. These are “Altered Images (GLEB, undated), The London Industrial
Strategy: the cultural industries (GLC, 1985), and most importantly, Saturday Night or Sunday Morning
(Mulgan and Worpole, 1996)”(Lewis, 1990, 50). In all of these documents we can easily see two
defined strands of arguments: on the one hand a clear attempt to show how culture can be an
important source of wealth, on the other a movement from subsidized forms of culture to more
economically sustainable (and popular) forms of culture. Traditional forms of avant-gardist art
and elitist forms of expression are suppressed in benefit of more popular and commercial
cultural forms. Still, we must not forget that these policies were made from a progressive
perspective and that the cultural industries were devised as a more sustainable response to the
current of privatization that the UK was undergoing. As Alan Finlayson puts it “an alternative
model explicitly connecting cultural policy to consumer culture was produced by the GLC, in
which the agenda was to politicize mass cultural forms and develop the Greater London
Enterprise Board, the GLC established community recording studios, non-commercial video
distribution in public libraries, and independent and radical book distribution co-ops and
publishing houses. This 'progressive cultural industries approach' emanated form the GLC's
Economic Policy Group”(Finlayson, 2000: 211). In this sense there is a clear political
ambivalence in the concept as it deploys a model for the economization of culture whilst
discursively confronting neoliberal assumptions. For example, Mulgan and Worpole's document
combines a Marxist rhetoric with the need to justify the transformation of culture into an
economic asset. They write: “the cultural industries which produce the words, sounds, images
and meanings that surround and bombard us have been immensely dynamic in the recent years.
The Marxist superstructure, the realm of ideas and ideologies, has become a primary motor for
the economic base” (1986:10). This combination of a Marxist analysis and a model of industrial
organization will tend to lose its political implications as the discourse around the cultural
industries develops, but still it is interesting to see how originally there is a will to overcome the
austerity and privatization imposed by neoliberal policies with a model in which culture was a
43
central element of development. On the final pages of their book, these two authors (remember
that Geoff Mulgan will later become advisor to the Blair government) recommend “the
establishment of a Media and Cultural Industries Development Board responsible for
commercial investment in innovative media and cultural enterprises” (1986:126) in order to
promote the cultural industries from a government level. Ten years later this recommendation
turned into a reality with the establishment of the DCMS, but a very important conceptual twist
took place in the meanwhile.
In the year 1994 the Australian government designed a bold set of policies with the aim of
promoting the continent’s economy, under the name of Creative Nation: Commonwealth and
Cultural Policy8 the first public policy document in which the notion of the ‘creative sector’ arises.
Under this concept they confined a set of micro-enterprises, freelance and independent workers
that functioned on the margins of the mainstream cultural industries but could still constitute a
quantifiable source of value. These entities were relatively small compared with the large cultural
corporations but were considered a key element to understand new forms of production that
were emerging in the cities. This important piece of cultural policy discusses the need to valorize
cultural heritage in order to attract cultural tourism, defines the idea of culture as both a form of
collective identity and as an economic asset and most importantly, it locates creativity as one of
the most important factors of production of wealth in contemporary economies. The cultural
industries need that creativity, which is a fuzzy concept that never gets fully addressed, in order
to grow and produce new commodities. I will discuss the notion of creativity and its
implications in terms of governance in further chapters, but still it is important to notice that
this document also introduces the strategic value of the cultural industries as a growth motor
and recommends the government to implement the following measures:
Industry assistance programmes extended to embrace specific cultural industries;
Encouraging demand for cultural products;
Measures to support the domestic production of cultural industries, including
coordination with other levels of government;
Measures to increase cultural exports;
Measures to enable cultural industries to adapt to new technology, such as multimedia;
Strong protection of intellectual property through copyright legislation; and
The development of research on the size and shape of cultural industries and their
employment base9.
8 http://www.nla.gov.au/creative.nation/contents.html (Last Accessed September 2009)
9 http://www.nla.gov.au/creative.nation/industry.html (Last Accessed September 2009)
44
One of the key aspects introduced in this policy document was the need to implement a strong
intellectual property framework, in order to help transform the latent wealth inherent in culture
and transform it into economic returns. This idea that was later introduced and lies at the core
of a set of policies designed in the United Kingdom in which this idea of creativity is put to
work and becomes a central discursive concept to a set of policies and economic programmes;
but what is very important to flag up is that for the first time tangible and intangible elements of
culture are pointed out as possible sources of wealth. This will give rise to a complete new set of
discourses on the valorization of culture.
The Creative Industries
In the year 1997, with the rise of Tony Blair as Britain’s Prime Minister following a landslide
victory of the Labour Party in the general election, the cultural industries were assigned a central
role in the economic development programme for the UK., but with a key conceptual twist: the
term “cultural” was exchanged with the term “creative”, giving rise to what they branded as the
“creative industries”. The Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) was put in the
hands of Chris Smith, a controversial figure who had coined sentences such as ‘I don’t believe in
grants for the sake’ or ‘something for nothing’, and provoked the biggest changes in cultural
policy since the creation of the Arts Council by J.M Keynes in the 1940s (Ryan, Wallinger &
Warnock 2000). He soon commissioned the Creative Industries Mapping Document, with the
aim of measuring the economic and growth potential of the creative sector and setting the
guidelines for the structural development of this new economic reality. The Labour government
started a complex production system of empty rhetoric, numbers and statistics, publicity stunts
(such as Cool Britannia) and policies aimed at imposing this new economic view of culture. Spin
was to put to work glossing up documents and think tanks such as DEMOS were invited to
produce evidence of the importance of creativity as a new source of wealth. Agencies such as
the Creative Industries Task Force was put in place, Chris Smith directed the organization and
amongst its members were “in addition to government representatives such as Mandelson”
entrepreneurs such as “Richard Branson of Virgin, Alan McGee of Creation records, fashion
designer Paul Smith, and Eric Salama of advertising giants WPP” (Davies & Ford 1997). The
British government took the lead in the promotion of the creative industries as the new
millennium’s business model; by doing so it defined and shaped the rules of the game. The
government established 13 key sectors that were clustered under the umbrella of the creative
industries: “Advertising; Architecture; Arts and antique markets; Crafts; Design; Designer
fashion; Film, video and photography; Interactive leisure software; Music; Visual and
45
performing arts; Publishing; Software and computer services; Television and Radio10” (DCMS
2001). Under this classification areas such as crafts, visual arts or design which until then had
functioned under the economic radar, suddenly were perceived and governed as if they were
part of an industrial sector. This implied very serious changes in the targets set for these
activities. Culture was now perceived as an economic asset and practices that had functioned
under different logics, based more on collectives, groups and friendship, were suddenly
privatized. To capture the value generated by these emergent sectors the government established
copyright as the most effective tool in order to transform knowledge into economic returns. We
get a clear idea of this fact when we read the definition provided by the DCMS in order to
define the sector, in which it states that the creative industries are:
“those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent which have a
potential for job and wealth creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual
property11”
If we look carefully at this definition two extremely important issues arise. Firstly we notice how
the notion of individual creativity is introduced, excluding all other forms of collective or
commons-based creativity. Secondly, intellectual property (a method of privatization or
enclosure of knowledge as we saw in the previous chapter) is imposed as the only way to extract
value from creativity. These two points set out a very specific agenda and define the economic
models that constitute the creative industries which exclude peer-based production, collective
creativity, shared knowledge etc. In this sense this prescriptive definition helps to shape and
understand most of the models that creative enterprises adopt and all the entities designed to
promote the sector will enforce this model on the budding enterprises they well mentor. We see
very clearly that the whole project of the creative industries is devised to define, enclose and
extract the wealth generated by social production.
To begin with the DCMS seems to interpelate the “the apparently innate creativity of our
people”(1998:25) as Smith has put it in a series of speeches and articles compiled together under
the name of Creative Britain even though he never comes up with a clear definition of what
creativity means. He puts it in these terms “the creative spirit cannot be pinned down into
bureaucratic formats. Creativity after all, is about adding the deepest value to human
life”(1998:1). The concept seems to encompass several notions and, as Alan Finlayson clearly
states, “Creative Britain has a clear investment, and I use the term deliberately, in the notion of
10
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.culture.gov.uk/reference_library/publications
/4632.aspx (Last Accessed September 2009)
11 http://www.idea.gov.uk/idk/core/page.do?pageId=10079358 (Last Accessed September 2009)
46
'culture' as a realm of individualized creativity. We are told that 'individual creativity is where it
starts'; and the notion of culture which is being mobilized owes a great deal to a Romantic
notion of high culture”(2000: 208). So we can see how a specific notion of an individualized
creative subjective is being mobilized. In the following chapter I will go deeper into this notion
as I will be addressing the figure of the cultural entrepreneur.
Similarly by putting intellectual property as the central element of the transformation of creative
value into economic wealth, a very specific approach to the cultural commons is sketched out,
allowing a land grab of all those forms of invention that until that moment laid beyond the
reach of the market. Social production is perceived as the new source of economic wealth; most
of these schemes just allowed and normalized the ways in which to access this wealth. One of
the key defenders of intellectual property as the key element to differentiate and sustain the
creative industries is John Howkins, which in his book The Creative Economy (Howkins 2001),
defines this new sector as the ‘copyright industries’, including in this definition “all those
industries that create copyright or related works as their primary product: advertising, computer
software design, photography, film, video, performing arts, music (publishing, recording and
performing), publishing, radio and TV, and video games. Art and architecture also qualify as
copyright works, but in most cases their rights are marginal to their economic value”(2001, xiii).
This categorization doesn’t differ much from those included in the creative industries by the
DCMS that we have defined previously. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)
has also favoured the term ‘copyright based industries’ as we can see in its pamphlet ‘Guide on
Surveying the Economic Contribution of the Copyright-Based Industries’ (WIPO 2002). In
contrast, in countries such as Brazil, they have deployed the notion of the ‘creative economy’
(Fonseca-Reis, 2007). This choice is highly influenced by the UNCTAD12 which uses this term
in several official documents (see UNCTAD 2008). Despite using different words to describe
the same project, in all cases there is a basic agreement on the importance of intellectual
property as the main source of revenue for the companies operating in the creative sector. In
some cases this will be evident in the name different nations adopt (as in the case of the
copyright industries) while in others the notion of creativity will try to defuse the economical
and regulatory implications of the previous. Another aspect that all these descriptions share in
common is a profound optimism on the economic potential offered by the creative industries
which in all cases are described as the true source of value and wealth for the urban economies.
Just a quick look into all the documents and figures put forward by the different governments is
enough to understand the main argument they support: that culture and creativity can be a great
source of economic wealth. Graphs with arrows aiming at the sky seem to sustain this idea.
12
United Nations Conference for Trade and Development
47
Andrew Ross reflects on this reality and argues that “if you lump all the economic activities of
arts and economic professionals together with those in software to create a sector known as the
‘creative industries’ you would have, on paper at least, a revenue powerhouse that generated £60
billion a year (in 2000, revised and improved estimates put the figure at £112 billion)” (Ross,
2007:21). In 1998 Chris Smiths stated that “broadly it is possible to estimate that nearly 1 million
people are employed in these industries. There are more than 1000 businesses and the annual
turnover of them all, put together, is over £50 billion”(Smith, 1998:15). All these figures have
been seriously challenged. Kate Oakley in her study ‘Not so cool Britannia: the role of the
creative industries in economic development’ (Oakley 2004), has showed clearly how most of
these estimates have never been confirmed and in many cases there is evidence that proves
them wrong. In this sense another interesting document to look into was put forward by the
Greater London Authority in the year 2007 in which its author, Alan Freeman, questions some
of the figures generated by the DCMS. Showing how creative accounting works, Freeman
argues that to calculate the amount of creative workers held by the sector, the DCMS had added
not only creative professionals but also creative agents working in non-creative spaces (a
musician working as a bar- tender for example), non-creative people working in creative places
(ushers or clerks working in theatres or cinemas) and finally indirect jobs created by the creative
sector (such as video camera repair workshops) (see Freeman 2007). All these different activities
need to be added in order to get close to the initial figures put forward in different studies by
the DCMS. Even though a powerful PR machinery had been erected, and even though the
figures seemed to be fragile, the discourses that these agencies generated had permeated the
political arena and many of these ideas were taken for granted and implemented in different
cities and regions of the UK.
One of the more direct consequences of all the plans launched by the government to promote
the creative industries is that a big number of practices and activities that until then functioned
at the margins of the economy were suddenly confronted with the market. In some cases these
entities had been subsidized by the state, in others they depended on informal sources of
income and big doses of self-organization to function, but in most cases the market was not
perceived as the way to sustain the different activities carried out by these collectives. All this
started to change, in part pushed by a set of policies that replaced subsidies for loans or other
financial products. Public funds were more and more difficult to access and the market was
offered as a solution for cultural agents and collectives willing to keep on developing their
activities. As Ross argues “while it was acknowledged that some institutions and individuals
would still require public support to produce their work, this would be spoken of as an
‘investment’ with an anticipated return, rather than a ‘subsidy’ offered to some supplicant, grant-
dependent entity”(2009:25). There was a linguistic reconstruction of the terms used in the sector
48
but also an institutional process of construction of financial products destined to promote the
emergence of new cultural entrepreneurs and creative enterprises. Suddenly self-orgs, arts
collectives, artists, musicians and designers were being described as economic actors and were
artificially introduced into an industrial sector where they shared space and resources with the
big enterprises of the cultural industries such as publishing houses, record labels, cinema studios
etc. This pushed micro-initiatives to learn about and operate in economic environments; they
started using the same jargon, methods and economic resources used by the big corporations,
but most importantly, they started having the same aims: to create wealth from cultural
products. The creative industries and their ability to tap into great pools of social creativity
became key elements in the introduction of new ideas, sounds, trends etc. that could be
exploited and turned into innovations by the large culture enterprises, which still are much
slower and less effective accessing the cultural commons.
In this context a new economic and cultural agent is introduced: the cultural entrepreneur or, as
Davies and Ford have branded it, ‘the culturepreneur’. The figure of the artist, the musician or
the designer are put to one side in favour of cultural entrepreneurs, capable of transforming
their cultural activities into lucrative business. On this issue Ross states that “the preferred
labour profile is more typical of the eponymous struggling artist, whose long-abiding
vulnerability to occupational neglect is now magically transformed, under the new order of
creativity, into a model of enterprising, risk-tolerant pluck”(Ross, 2007:19). This new agent has
been shaped following some of the archetypes and ideals that emerged with the new economy in
the United States (Henwood, 2003). The by now almost mythological figure of bearded
teenagers tinkering in their sheds and garages to eventually become some of the wealthier
people of the world has contributed to shape the social imaginary 13. It is in this context in
which, as Ross reminds us, “the small, entrepreneurial start-up was hailed as a superior species,
likely to adapt more quickly and evolve further in a volatile business environment” (Ross,
2011:45). The small entrepreneurial enterprise is now pictured as the economic model best
suited to develop the economy; creators are now branded as cultural entrepreneurs and the
creative industries are promoted all over the world as the future of the economy. I will go
deeper into the implications of entrepreneurship in culture in the following chapter, discussing
some of the discourses, schemes and contradictions that arise and the wide spread of cultural
entrepreneurship.
13
Two great movies that have contributed in building this myth are Pirates of the Silicon Valley by
Martin Burke (1999) or Start-up.com by Hehegus y Noujaim (2001)
49
Changes in Cultural Policy
All these changes in mentality were invigorated by a series of simultaneous changes that took
place in the realm of cultural policy that altered the ways in which culture was to be regulated
and financed. These changes were in part propitiated by some of the social movements that,
during the sixties and seventies, challenged the state and its institutions that had endemically
neglected the interests of ethnic minorities or marginal communities that were never present in
major museums or public art galleries. Some policy booklets reflect this tension clearly as in the
case of a document named ‘The Arts Britain Ignores’ in which one can read how ethnic
minority arts face many problems, amongst them “those of neglect: lack of premises to rehearse,
lack of comparable back-up that is afforded to equivalent British native groups, lack of
acceptance within the arts structure and lack of exposure”(Khan, 1976:5). The document
exposes how the lack of interest in these other forms of expression translates into a lack of
subsidies for these practices, in that sense it recognises the failure of the Arts Council to
understand the diversity and cultural needs of contemporary Britain. This is why it is important
to remember that when the Conservatives came into power in the UK during the late seventies
they set out to solve this problem with an extremely powerful argument:, namely that all these
cultural problems could be solved if culture was put into the hands of the most democratic
institution, that is, the free market. The critics of the state put forward by feminist activists,
ethnic minorities or other social groups were used by this neoliberal government as a perfect
excuse to start dismantling some public institutions in favour of the market, which in theory was
an impartial and transparent entity. Thatcher’s government was the first of many that introduced
cuts in the funding of culture and favoured all those cultural enterprises capable of generating
economic returns, as it attempted to fashion state-run arts bodies in the image of corporate
business practices. The relationship between culture and the state was altered completely, as
now the state wasn’t expected to look after culture, promote its accessibility or excellence, but
on the contrary, the role of the state was to allow creative enterprises to promote, exploit and
deliver cultural goods. As the cultural analyst Jim McGuigan reminds us:
“the Senior Officer at the Arts Council of Great Britain, Anthony Field said in 1982: the Arts
Council has to hang on to the very best the rest will survive (or not!) without public subsidy -
the dregs of theatre, the mediocre, the work that is up-and-coming or on the way out’(…) what
Field is saying here already hints at the increasingly powerful language of money and efficiency
whereby all value would be reduced to exchange value, the discourse of the market in cultural
policy as in everything else” (McGuigan ,2004:42). A much more instrumental vision of culture
was promoted and decisions should be taken on a purely economic basis. This privatization of
culture, as in all neoliberal discourses, was considered inevitable by the Conservative
government.
50
These visions fuelled one of the biggest transformations of cultural policy, redefining its
purposes, functions and implications. As McGuigan writes “in the past cultural policy has been
rationalized in various ways, including the amelioration of ‘market failure’ for practices deemed
to have a cultural value that is not reducible to economic value. While this rationalization
persists residually, it has very largely been superseded by an exclusively economic rationale”
(2004:1). For the first time one of the most important discussions in contemporary cultural
policy was framed: should we consider culture as a right or as a resource (Yudice, 2002). This
debate has transcended the British Isles and is currently present in a great part of the culture
ministries of Europe. In France this discussion caused a fierce public debate when its culture
minister Jack Lang questioned the centralized idea of culture imposed by one of his most
famous predecessors, André Malraux. The importance that culture has in the shaping of the
French national identity is without doubt, and as Kim Eling author of The Politics of Cultural Policy
in France writes “in few liberal democracies does government policy towards the arts occupy as
prominent a position in political discourse, or does government involve itself as directly and as
intimately in the cultural life of a nation, as in contemporary France” (Eling, 1999:1). This
author argues that this is in part due to the fact that most of these policies are directly linked to
rules imposed by the French absolutist monarchy. The contemporary French government has
inherited its centrality as the entity responsible for the promotion of culture from this era and
has assumed two clear and complementary roles “that of patron, offering direct support to
individual artists and institutions; second, that of censor, concomitantly imposing tight controls
on the production and distribution of the works of art” (Eling, 1999:1). This centrality has
sparked numerous critiques, some of the most convincing arguments have been articulated by
the French historian and cultural analyst Marc Fumaroli who in his book The Cultural State
(2007) audits the French cultural policy that has taken place during the last hundred years and
formulates his main critique, that France has turned into a ‘cultural state’. Fumaroli blames
Malraux for most of the maladies that affect cultural policy, for when he first came into office in
1959, under the supervision of Charles de Gaulle, the author, poet and adventurer “designed the
cultural ideology that has become hegemonic in France”(Fumaroli, 2007:157). This supposed
ideology is a combination of several notions: the will to ‘democratize’ culture and the will to
make culture accessible to the people combined with cultural snobbery and the idea that the
people should be ‘educated’ and mentored by the state. Fumaroli claims that Malraux’s policy
sets out the political framework defined by ‘left-wingers’ to promote their ideology and impose
it onto all the citizens. This centrality of the government on cultural matters only started to
change in 1981 when François Mitterrand came into power and named a new and very
controversial cultural ministry.
51
As Eling notes “under no other president did the Minister of Culture and his administration
occupy as important a place, both in terms of the prestige and public recognition they enjoyed,
and in terms of the financial means at their disposal, as the Mitterrand years” (Eling, 1999:XiV).
This president named Jack Lang as his ministry of culture and gave him the mission to re-design
the culture ministry introducing a series of changes that altered the ways in which culture had
been governed for more than 20 years. The centrality of the government in matters of culture
was never challenged but the aims and targets the ministry should accomplish were profoundly
altered. As Eling writes “Malraux and his successors had openly expressed their disdain even for
traditional popular art forms like chanson (…) Lang, by contrast, not only accepted popular
culture as in no way inferior to ‘high’ culture, but actively sought to expand the remit to his
Ministry to encompass the entirety of the artistic forms” (Eling, 1999:8). As Eling continues
arguing “this represented a significant departure from the premises of cultural policy in the
Malrasian sense, in which the delivery of culture to the people was conceived of fundamentally
as a public service, and forms of cultural production surviving only thorough the interplay of
supply and demand in the market economy were perceived almost by definition as mere
entertainment” (Eling, 1999:9). The notion of commercial culture was introduced as something
to be policed and looked after by the state. In this sense the cultural policy developed by Lang,
which has been later continued by his successors, combines the centrality of the state with an
interest in commercial culture., The state protects national cinema, national music, national
literature etc, whilst encouraging the private sector to develop and introduce these products into
the market. This has lead to the introduction of the notion of ‘cultural exception’ coined in 1993
by the French Government and promoted at the GATT meeting in order to treat cultural goods
and services differently than other traded goods and services because of its intrinsic differences.
So we see that the neoliberal model promoted in the UK has had an impact on the French
model, but it still has managed to keep the centrality of the state as an administrator of culture.
This model has influenced many other European countries such as Spain, Portugal or Italy.
In all cases we note a very important change in public policy taking place: culture is increasingly
being regulated by economic policies rather than cultural ones. From a neoliberal perspective,
the value of culture resides in its capacity to yield economic profits. Culture that needs to be
publicly subsidized is questioned (Cowen, 2000) and the discourse of the creative industries
encourages the economisation and businessification of cultural projects previously on the
margins of the economy. This process takes place according to a specific logic which consists in
promoting the economic growth that will be collectively generated by the numerous cultural
enterprises.
52
Economic Development
After the creative hype started losing some of its fuel in the UK, the British creative industries
model and rhetoric began to be promoted as a means of economic development, first in
European countries and then in countries with emerging economies. The spin machine had
succeeded in imposing its discourse which now was travelling through all the major cultural
institutions of the world. These ideas were accepted completely unchallenged by some of the
world’s most important international economic and cultural institutions which prompted and
encouraged the spread of the creative industries across the world. Institutions such as
UNESCO, or trade agencies such as UNCTAD or WIPO repeated the discourse and in the
2004 UNESCO meeting in Sao Paulo 14 a clear statement was made under the title “Sao Paulo
Statement for the role of Culture in the Development and Integration of Latin America15” in
which there is an agreement on the importance of culture in the development of Latin American
countries. One of the points in the document reads: “We recognize that culture (…) needs to be
considered as an economic sector. In this sense we recommend all the governments to destine
at least 1% of the GDP in investments in the culture sector”. This statement implies that culture
needs to be treated and promoted as an economic sector, in a clear aim to introduce the creative
industries in Latin American countries. These statements opened a completely new paradigm in
cultural policy and showed the way to follow for a big number of cooperation and development
schemes promoted by different governments across the world. One of the latest is the Valencia
Declaration put forwards by the Ibermedia16 program, in which we can read the following point
“we can assert that the policies designed to promote cultural cooperation have been rightly
aimed at creating the conditions for a development of a cultural industry in Latin America”.
This declaration makes some very important recommendations for policy, among them “there is
a need to change mentality, we should promote a culture of entrepreneurship” and “we need to
maintain and increase the cooperation funds aiming them at the growth of small and medium
sized cultural enterprises”. Its last recommendation is aimed at “unifying intellectual property
regimes in an aim to facilitate the distribution of audiovisual contents among Latin American
14
http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-
URL_ID=23215&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html (Last Accessed September 2009)
15
http://portal.unesco.org/es/files/23037/110076962511DECLARACI%D3N_DE_SAO_PAULO_SOBRE_L
A_CULTURA_EN_EL_DESARROLLO_Y_LA_INTEGRACI%D3N_DE_AM%C9RICA_LATINA.pdf/D
ECLARACI%D3N%2BDE%2BSAO%2BPAULO%2BSOBRE%2BLA%2BCULTURA%2BEN%2BEL%2B
DESARROLLO%2BY%2BLA%2BINTEGRACI%D3N%2BDE%2BAM%C9RICA%2BLATINA.pdf (Last
Accessed September 2009).
16 http://www.programaibermedia.com/langes/index.php Ibermedia is a cultural cooperation initiative
developed by the Spanish government, with the aim to promote the creation of a Spanish-Latin
American cinema.
53
countries17”. Schemes like this one do not stand alone; in Spain, agencies such as CIC BATÁ 18
have redirected all of their cultural cooperation programmes in order to promote the emergence
of cultural industries in the so called “developing countries” - Eutopia19 is a clear example of
this with programmes running in Cuba, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Mexico and Bolivia. Many such
initiatives also cover Africa. A clear case of this comes in the shape of the different schemes
promoted by Interarts,20 with European Union funds in countries like Senegal where they are
intending to develop a network of cultural enterprises21. They have also promoted cultural
entrepreneurship in Peru and Bolivia in previous schemes.
Some basic principles underlie all of these policy documents and schemes: culture must be
considered an economic resource that can be used for the development of countries with
emergent economies. Again we see how these plans recognize the amount of ideas, sounds and
cultural artefacts that can be found in these countries but also show how these circulate beyond
the market’s limits. These sources of wealth are held in common and enterprises must be
introduced in order to capture and extract value from these common ideas. These policies must
also take for granted that economic growth (gained with the creative economy) will lead to social
development, accepting that culture has generated economic growth in Europe. I intend to
challenge such assumptions and show how most of the ideas related to the notion of culture as a
motor for economic growth spawn from the principles written in the first documents aimed at
promoting the creative industries in the UK, and assuming some of the ideas contained in them,
even though there is consistent proof of how many of these schemes failed to reach their
original targets. I also want to focus on some of the problems embedded in this model,
questioning their potential as a tool for development and challenging the notion of development
as a whole. These issues need to be discussed acknowledging the fact that during recent years
there have been a strand of events, conferences and debates 22 organized by international public
bodies promoting the creative industries as the solution to most of the problems in the so called
“under-developed” countries. These seem to replicate the glossified arguments put forward by
the think-tanks that influenced New Labour’s policy for the creative industries during the 1990s.
Still, there has never been an attempt to substantiate many of the claims held in these early
17These points are extracted from the draft document which was made public in December 2009.
18 http://www.cicbata.org/?q=node/2 (Last Accessed February 2010).
19 http://festivaleutopia.org/index.php/experiencias/jornadas-de-cultura-y-desarrollo (Last Accessed
February 2010).
20http://www.interarts.net/ (Last Accessed February 2010).
21http://www.interarts.net/ca/encurso.php?pag=1&p=291 (Last Accessed February 2010).
22 http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-
URL_ID=38112&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html (Last Accessed February 2010).
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0015/001572/157287E.pdf (Last Accessed February 2010).
http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/files/30634/11441551479london_declar.pdf/london_declar.pdf (Last
Accessed February 2010).
54
documents. Recent reports, most notably Freeman (2007) and Reid, Albert & Hopkins (2010)
have shown that the growth figures for the creative industries in the UK have never been met.
They also show how clearly this sector has failed to generate employment, as in most cases the
enterprises it comprises have never grown, so in the best of cases we see the creation of pockets
of self-employment. Despite this there are still some who think it possible and desirable to
promote development through culture. An interesting case in point is the Brazilian researcher
Ana Carla Fonseca Reis, who has written extensively on the subject. According to her, “the
creative economy provides an opportunity to rescue citizens - integrating them into society - and
consumers - including them into the economy” (Fonseca Reis, 2008:15)23. And yet, Fonseca
Reis clarifies that for this to take place, the British model should not be blindly embraced as she
acknowledges that “it is undeniable that part of the attention aroused by the creative economy
is due to the economic impact statistics circulated by the sector, following the British example”
(Fonseca Reis, 2008:20).
Kate Oakley has challenged the idea that the creative industries, due to their creative nature can
constitute a powerful engine of social inclusion. According to this author, at the beginning “the
perception that the creative class was meritocratic, open to talent and unlikely to be bound by
prejudices about race, gender or sexuality, led to the hope that these sectors opened up routes to
participation among those from excluded groups” (Oakley, 2006:262). It wasn’t too long before
this assumption was openly questioned. Very soon, the figures presented a much cruder reality:
“about 4.6 per cent of the creative and cultural industry work force in the UK are from an ethic
minority background compared with 7 per cent of the UK labour force as a whole. This is even
more disturbing when one considers the concentration of creative industry employment in
London, where over a quarter of the labour force is from an ethnic minority background”
(Oakley, 2006:263). Even Richard Florida, the guru and leading defender of the creative class,
unknowingly reveals a very unfortunate reality in terms of ethnic-related work discrimination. If
we look at one of the three indexes that he uses to evaluate the creative potential of a specific
region, namely tolerance24, we will be confronted by a very bleak landscape. According to this
controversial author, “the results again support the basic notion that diversity and creativity
work together to power innovation and economic growth” (Florida, 2002:262), and so he
examines the diversity levels - people of different geographic, ethnic and other background -
within the different contexts that he analyses. When the diversity levels are high in a specific
context, then it is much more prone to being creative, and consequently, productive. However,
Florida himself must admit that there is a major problem with his evaluation scale, which is that
it reflects quite an uncomfortable reality, given that the graph “does not include African-
23
Again, we see discourse aimed at capturing communities and introducing them into the market.
24
The three indicators that he uses are talent, technology and tolerance, what he calls the three Ts.
55
Americans and other non whites” (2002:262). The latter reflects a situation that Kate Oakley has
already condemned, and which Florida is forced to admit to, namely that “it appears that the
Creative Economy does little to ameliorate the traditional divide between the white and non-
white segments of the population. It might even make it worse” (2002:63).
Unlike other sectors that have conscientiously worked to eradicate gender related discrimination,
in the creative industry sector this form of discrimination is rife, as has been denounced on
various occasions. Henceforth we will analyse the contributions of Rosalind Gill, Mark Banks
and Milestone three British scholars whose research centres on the new forms of gender
discrimination that have taken root in the context of the creative-cultural industries. Banks and
Milestone warn us that “the discourse of ‘flexibility’ and ‘creative freedom’ has been allowed to
mask some fundamental inequalities and discriminatory practices in cultural work. In particular,
following the work of other new economy critics, we argue that the organization of ostensibly
‘detraditionalized’ and ‘reflexive’ cultural industries work can enhance the possibility for the
reapplication of some rather ‘traditional’ forms of gender discrimination and inequality” (Banks
and Milestone, 2011). This occurs, according to the authors, because the “dissolution of
sedimented forms of social power can exert what has been paradoxically termed a
‘retraditionalizing’ effect” (Banks and Milestone, 2011). Lack of stable forms of organisation,
extreme flexibility of the work practices in the sector, lack of frameworks of control, scarce and
sometimes nonexistent union representation and the disappearance of certain hierarchies that
are then replaced with systems of work with a network structure, have all prompted the loss of
union strength and the emergence of new forms of injustice that, in other sectors, are already
under control. This contrasts starkly with the mainstream view of creative work, which, as
Rosalind Gill perfectly explains, tends to be perceived as a sector “cool, creative and egalitarian.
This view is held by academics, policy-makers and also by new media workers themselves” (Gill,
2002:70). After carrying out an ethnographic research project with male and female new media
workers in England, Holland, France and Spain, Gill was able to ascertain the significance of
gender discrimination in the sector.
Scavenging the Nation State
As we have seen, the basic model that underlies the creative industries was born under
neoliberalism and in many ways, replicates neoliberal assumptions. Most scholarly works that
analyze the creative industries, notably Hesmondhalgh 2007, Caves 2002, Howkins 2002 or
Hartely 2004, define these enterprises as content creators and focus on the products, images or
symbols they produce. In contrast, in this final section I want to explore very different kinds of
creative companies, those that have targeted a completely different market: the remains of the
56
nation state. Following neoliberalism to its last consequences this new generation of enterprises
does not produce content but outsources services to the state. This typology of companies has
been understudied as they do not fit in with the depictions of the creative industries but are
present and constitute a large chunk of the sector. I will now introduce some case studies in
which we can see clearly how some of these enterprises have even considered the state as a
market to exploit. That is, reversing completely the trend in which culture was promoted and to
a certain extent funded by different public agencies (as we have seen with the French model),
now cultural enterprises have started to change and become service suppliers to different state
agencies and entities. These enterprises outsource public competences and functions,
developing tasks that used to be realized by public agencies. In this movement, these enterprises
will occupy a place in between NGOs and private firms, contributing to the ever growing
erosion of the nation state. I first came across this fact while doing fieldwork; I could not pin
down what a number of companies I interviewed produced exactly. Most of them had
progressively shifted away from artistic and cultural practices to work on “community based”
projects, “social innovation” initiatives or, putting it more bluntly, looking for competences that
the state was willing to externalize and providing “cultural” services to fit these needs.
I first realized this whilst talking with Asier Pérez, who I have known since he began work as an
artist and who at one point was gaining increasing popularity in the art scene through exhibiting
in art institutions, galleries etc. We had a long chat and he told me how early on in his career he
had started to think about the possibility of covering all of his activities under the umbrella of a
brand and this led to one of his first projects: Asier Pérez González, a one-man company based
on himself. Shortly after this he decided to expand his work and created a company named
“Funky Projects”, with which he would start working and applying artistic methods to brand
design, communication projects and transferring art techniques to the advertising industry.
Along these lines they developed a project in 2005 when a political agency from Extremadura,
the “Gabinete de Iniciativa Joven”, contracted them to develop a new flavour for an ice-cream.
The corporate image of this specific agency is orange, so they developed an orange flavoured ice
cream which was given away during a public presentation of this entity. So far this is quite
conventional - a communication agency providing a creative product for a client - but things
started getting more interesting as we will see below.
In an attempt to escape from the artistic side of their practice and to open new streams of
income, “Funky Projects” started to specialize in working with a quite specific set of clients: the
government and its different bodies and agencies. The difference is that they do not treat the
state as a client to which they must deliver some services to, but as a market in which to enter,
competing with the existent services and looking to carry out what until recently were public
57
functions. World Dinners, a project commissioned by the Immigration and Interculturalism
Department at Getxo’s City Council, is a clear example of this. Working with a local restaurant
their aim was to “create a place for the integration and mutual acknowledgement of the different
cultures living in Getxo”, a town near Bilbao. Immigrants from different countries had to
explain how to cook dishes from their origin country to the restaurant’s staff, using the Basque
they had learnt during a voluntary course they had enrolled on. In this way people from the
Basque Country got to try international food whilst immigrants practiced their recently acquired
language skills. I believe this project differs from the kind of projects that cultural production
companies used to carry out until now. This is a project clearly designed to fulfil the needs of a
specific council and it functions as an extension of the Immigration Department,
complementing its activities for the promotion of the use of Basque among immigrants. This
project also raises questions about the difference between these kinds of projects and work
developed by NGO’s, as the line between them starts becoming increasingly blurred.
“Funky Projects” has worked regularly with different political agencies in the Basque Country,
Holland or in the United Kingdom (places where they have opened branches in recent years).
Creating cultural events aimed at integrating immigrants, working with teenagers or solving
urban conflicts, now this company outsources a number of functions that used to be realised by
different governments. I have talked with Asier Pérez on a number of occasions in different
settings and places. The last time this happened was when I visited him at the company’s HQ in
the centre of Bilbao. The place is obviously a “funky” office, with yellow stripes stemming from
their logo crossing the floor and an informal and relaxed work atmosphere. Pérez is a lively
character who likes laughing and has always been convinced by his own work and ideas. After
showing me the place and joking about how much we had changed since the last time we met
he agreed to be recorded for an interview. We sat in a small hut they have installed in the centre
of the open office space, besides the bathroom which is the only other closed place. Inside there
was a big table, some chairs and fashionable lamps hanging from a low ceiling. On the
whiteboard hanging from one of the walls I could read the sentence “social innovation”, which
had been highlighted several times.
When asked how he defines the work carried out by his company Pérez replied with a sentence
that he must have practiced in the mirror several times before: “we work on programmes of
social innovation and participation through communication”. I asked about how he has gone
from working with art institutions to be in touch with such a large array of governmental
entities, to which he replied that in public agencies there are still a large amount of niches to tap
into and work to be done. This has helped the company to grow successfully, from having 3 to
58
9 staff members in just two years. They closed the year 2005 with profits of over 200 000€25 and
in 2006 things were looking better still. Pérez was then thinking about hiring a bigger space to
work in and more people to help out with the different projects they were carrying out. When
asked to specify about their clients Pérez explains that they work with several institutions which
go from local councils to the province and regional governments. What is interesting is that they
do not usually work for the culture department or get any money from them; instead they
frequently work with “the Basque language department, immigration, education, equality, youth,
social services…etc.”. They cover functions traditionally carried out by public agencies and they
privatize spaces that neoliberalism would usually leave for NGOs.
One of the most controversial projects they were working on is taking place in Manchester and
under the name of Showbar Manchester they aim to “design a platform that will provide visibility
to the social and cultural re-activation of Manchester’s Northern Quarter”. Under an umbrella
of a larger urban regeneration scheme they have designed a “pop-up bar”, a place where
business people can meet and where bigger brands can test out the possibility of establishing a
branch in this quarter of the city. On their website they explain that Manchester’s “Northern
Quarter, traditionally, hosted small textile businesses and warehouses that sunk years ago
worsening the area, its economy and its population. Nowadays there is a project to promote
creative industries, commerce and services, for the businesses established in the area26”, their
role is to function as intermediaries and help to attract private business to the area. The
“showbar” helps to integrate them through a number of cultural events that will be taking place
in the space, such as gigs, exhibitions, etc., so culture is used as an instrument to facilitate the
introduction of business into the area. This project is being opposed by a number of local
residents and retail associations, and when asked about why he believes people are saying that
this is just an undercover gentrification process, Pérez just smiles and dismisses the whole issue:
“well it’s just a bunch of hippies or people afraid of changes, with time they will see this is going
to bring improvements to the area”. Virno’s cynicism makes itself present. The whole scheme is
funded with public money and the briefing is quite clear: open-up the path for urban
regeneration.
In a similar context I interviewed some of the members of AMASTE, a small enterprise from
Bilbao that also started in the art sphere but has now developed a completely different set of
services and projects. When I first met Ricardo “richi” Antón, one of its founding members and
a highly charismatic person, AMASTE was still functioning as an editorial board that published
a trendy magazine named Eseté. This was produced largely with public funding and was
25 http://www.funkyprojects.com/adjuntos/N24/estrategia-funky.pdf (Last Accessed November 2009).
26 http://www.funkyprojects.com/projects.jsp?MODO=R&ID=63 (Last Accessed November 2009).
59
distributed across Spain. The magazine also commissioned art projects that were produced with
the help of public funding and the supervision of AMASTE, such as the Emancipator Bubble
carried out by Saioa Olmo. The project consisted of a promotional campaign of a prototype
inflatable bubble young people could purchase and attach to their parents´ home in order to
solve the housing problem. They produced a bubble gum in the shape of the Emancipator
Bubble, gave away flyers and designed a number of parallel activities to promote this project.
A series of factors, among which finding private funding for the magazine was the main issue,
were behind the magazine’s closure in 2005. This led to a big crisis for the company, which until
that moment had survived mainly on grants and bursaries provided by the culture department or
an art gallery, and now faced an uncertain future. During a year and a half AMASTE tried
targeting private firms, offering them creative promotional events: they worked with several
brands and products ranging from rum, erasers and night clubs, but this business model did not
provide enough income to sustain the company, which faced bankruptcy for some time. This
changed when they started selling the same type of services to different public institutions. They
have rebranded themselves, changing their image and defining themselves as a “creative
communication agency centred on the production and diffusion of messages related to today’s
society and contemporary culture27”. They have specialized in working on youth-oriented
projects and now deal with a number of public entities such as “youth and sports, social
integration, or innovation departments”. They target departments with poor communication
skills, lack of public presence or that are simply too busy to develop their own schemes and
provide “creative” solutions to their needs.
Ricardo’s discourse is very difficult to pin down and he seems to struggle with the contradiction
of aiming to become a successful business person as well as starting a revolution aimed at
destroying society. Meanwhile they use guerrilla aesthetics to grab the attention of youths that
get involved in their initiatives. He describes most of the projects they carry out as “tools for
social emancipation or social innovation”, although from the outside at times it is difficult to see
the political potential in this work. A recent workshop they organized for the Bilbao town
council was implemented in the San Francisco neighbourhood, a run down and problematic
neighbourhood in Bilbao. It consisted of inviting teenagers to clean up the streets, recycle
objects found in the public space and creating awareness about the natural beauty of the area,
working towards the regeneration of the neighbourhood. Ricardo argues that through these
projects “teenagers start thinking about their environments in a creative way, allowing them to
27 http://www.amaste.com/guerrilla.jsp?PG=100#(Last Accessed November 2009).
60
develop a critical approach to the notion of citizenship”. This is a key element for Ricardo’s
notion of revolution.
I find it really intriguing the way in which Ricardo keeps referring to the need to produce
“innovative citizens”, produce “social innovation” and so on because there are a number of
state-driven policies aimed at promoting innovation, and because I find it difficult to reconcile
these targets with Ricardo’s “revolutionary” ideas. After trying to convince me about how
desirable innovation is in order to build a critical social mass, he admits that with the growth of
Innovation Departments in the Basque government, branding their activities as innovative is
opening up a “huge new institutional market”. If Culture Departments usually have a limited
budget, “Innovation Departments are flowing with money, nothing to do with the conditions
we used to face when working with cultural institutions”. The state has turned into a market,
and these creative enterprises are shaping their discourses and activities in order to access it and
supply services to different departments and agencies. Seeing the state as a set of economic
possibilities helps me understand why someone like Ricardo, who proudly would describe
himself as a social activist has no problems in accepting to work on schemes that others would
refuse to accept. AMASTE has finished being a mediator between state discourses and the
society. They provide a cultural envelope that helps the state to deliver given discourses. One of
the projects they have designed took place on the “Day of the Entrepreneur 28”, and was aimed
at creating awareness of entrepreneurship among teenagers. They called it “Bilbao Storming”
and the event was conceived as a “collective brain storming session” in which people wrote
down entrepreneurial ideas on brain shaped stickers which were to be stuck on giant panels
placed in a public venue. So we see how cultural enterprises are not only prompted to be more
entrepreneurial but end up designing and implementing campaigns aimed at promoting
entrepreneurialism. These enterprises “culturalise” public discourses, facilitating their social
assimilation.
In a completely different region of Spain, Extremadura, I interviewed Ignacio Escobar, who
runs e-cultura, one of Spain’s biggest cultural enterprises. This company has offices in Mérida,
Madrid, Seville and Santiago de Compostela and a workforce of about 50 members of staff.
Ignacio is an extremely enthusiastic person; annoyingly he constantly repeats that he only works
on “cool projects” and that makes him really proud. Most of his clients are public institutions to
which they provide services, specializing in art and cultural institutions: they outsource content
for museums, they edit the Museomanía magazine (a journal on museology and archiving), and
28
This is part of a scheme that takes place in Spain and each regional community has its own
Entrepreneur Day which they celebrate with a number of activities ranging from concerts, lectures,
public events, etc. For more information visit http://www.diaemprendedor.es/
61
they organize conferences and lectures for universities and art galleries, and so on. He confesses
“I look at a city and think, what does it need? And I come up with an idea. Then I package it
properly and sell it to the government, council or whoever is in charge”. Operating this way they
have managed to monopolize the management of cultural spaces in Extremadura and have
created an effective network with the government, working closely in the design of new political
agencies to whom they will later outsource contents. An example of this is the design and
creation of the “Gabinete de Iniciativa Joven”, a private entity destined to promote cultural
entrepreneurship in Extremadura or the “Espacios para la Creación Joven” a network of
workshop and cultural spaces opened up across the same region aimed at activating the creative
potential in children and teenagers. When asked what does e-cultura do exactly, he smiles and
answers “we see a problem or a social need that can be solved with culture, we design a solution
and we go to the government and see how much they are willing to pay for it”, and after
thinking for a few seconds he comes back and admits “we always come up with cool
projects…”.
Having saturated the market with cultural services he is currently designing projects destined to
open up new “institutional markets”; he confesses that he has just finished a project aimed to
solve the “the increasing number of deaths that happen in traffic accidents”. He cannot give me
further information about it, as it’s at an early stage, but he is really confident he can pull it off.
“If a project is cool, who cares who your client is? It could be a cultural institute but it could
also be the Road and Traffic Ministry in the central government. We aim to sell solutions to
anyone who can afford them”. Ignacio is an overpowering person, and I think that has helped
him to sell his services to such a big array of institutions, but I leave his office looking for a cold
beer with serious doubts on the efficiency of culture to solve the world’s problems. I suppose
that at least it can help to embellish them, and that is what the government is paying for.
Governments have never been cool...
Outsourcing education: la Fundició and HAMACA
La Fundició is a strange entity, it started operating as a cooperative in 2006 and it provides a
very specific product: critical pedagogy units for education and cultural spaces (or putting it
bluntly, outsourcing critical pedagogy to the state). This can seem, and is, a very complex
product to market and this translates on the poor revenues La Fundició is making so far. I have
coincided and worked with Francisco Rubio on a number of occasions, as he is one of the four
funding partners of the cooperative which now comprises of four workers. I used to work for
him in an art gallery he directed in Barcelona during 2000-2001 and we have remained friends
ever since then, which is why I have followed the growth and development of his enterprise
62
closely. Until now La Fundició has worked with a number of high schools, education
departments and art spaces, providing and designing pedagogical units or programmes.
Francisco admits that “the education market is quite complicated, you have to deal with people
who have been doing the same job for ages and they have become really reluctant to change or
adapt to changes” -novelties are not always welcome. There is also a problem concerning power:
“there are many hierarchical structures inserted in educational systems and it’s difficult for
newcomers to understand them”. Still La Fundició is one amongst other recent enterprises
willing to provide content for state-run institutions, helping to update them with new
pedagogical techniques and making it easy for them to incorporate radical theory or critical
pedagogy to their curricula. I ask Francisco if he does not believe that critical pedagogy should
be a part of education anyway? He smiles: “now teachers are struggling just to comply with their
targets and regular curricula, any kind of activity that exceeds this is seen as a problem.” This is
where an agency such as La Fundició can fit in, providing content that teachers are not able to
cover regularly. It is also very complicated for some institutions to access contemporary culture,
and in that sense Francisco exploits his knowledge and contacts within the field to invite artists,
activists or musicians to take part and contribute with some of the projects his company
develops.
The education system has grown relentlessly during the last few years and there is no doubt
about how it has slowly turned into a massive business. The education market is gaining
importance and the fact that companies such as la Fundició are emerging only helps to show
how education is being perceived as a place in which to effectuate business. What’s interesting
about la Fundició is how they manage to interface between schools and a critical art scene,
introducing some of the contents of one site into the other. For their project Just Play It, they
used an art centre, Can Felipa, as an encounter space in which children from different primary
schools met regularly in order to design a video game, aiming with this to “encourage children
to think about the forms of representation/simulation that characterize videogames and how
these affect subjectivity, desire or the collective imaginary29”. A current project in which they are
working on is named Projecte3* and is a one year long initiative that links two High Schools with
two groups of radical architects, Catarqsis and Santiago Cirujeda. The aim is to help re-think the
education space and the habits and customs it creates among students. They are aiming at
building an independent space inside the context of the school, which will be put together by
the students and used and managed by the students. A series of workshops will be carried out
29
http://www.lafundicio.net/fichaProj.php?ID=just&tit=JustPlayIt%20Can%20Felipa&tipo=1&fo=fondo4
(Last Accessed December 2009).
63
there during a year, the aim of which is to address critical questions concerning the education
system.
La Fundació are providing critical contents which some institutions are not able or willing to
produce themselves, generating a very specific niche market in which to operate. But more
importantly, they are opening up channels that can connect the educational field with cutting-
edge art, activism or architecture, an impossible task for regular primary school staff. Their
ability to mediate or to interface these two completely different fields constitutes their main
asset and that is what they sell. Again, they do not generate objects, they provide a very specific
service that public institutions are unable to offer. They have created a very specific market
niche which they now completely occupy. Things seem to be going well: I saw Francisco
recently whilst celebrating the birth of his second child and the company keeps growing, the
budget cuts provoked by the current economic downturn means that schools are ever more
desperate to hire their services as they are the cheapest way to build the academic curricula.
Operating in a different sector I want to introduce another enterprise whose business model was
originally based on providing contents but due to market contingencies and funding problems it
has shifted its orientation. I have discussed and analyzed the project, HAMACA, Video Art and
Media Distribution from Spain with Rubén Martínez (one of its directors) on numerous
occasions. I am one of the project’s founders so I have helped to define its business model, legal
framework, interface, look, intentions and aims and strategic development. Currently I have
stopped being directly involved in the project, now directed by Eli Lloveras and Rubén
Martínez30 to which I am still close. HAMACA was first conceived as a private enterprise and
was to function as a video art distribution company making its benefits from distributing
Spanish media and video works to museums, art galleries and media festivals. Besides this one
of the distributor’s aims was to start selling limited editions of video art for home viewing,
opening up an under-explored market, but these plans were forced to change due to economic.
We first started working on HAMACA on 2005, when the Visual Artists Union from Catalonia
hired my company YProductions to run it, and the project was made public after working on it
during two years in March 2007. Now, after almost six years of activities, they felt it necessary to
revise its functioning and needs, redefining its business model to fit its real market.
Due to a series of internal strategic decisions, but mostly due to funding needs, we decided to
start the project as a non-profit cultural society which until now has been subsidized by the state
30
Rubén and Eli are also my work partners in YProductions, a cultural production company that I
myself co-founded.
64
through different agencies, managing to fundraise about 90 000€ per year31. This amount is
insufficient to cover the distributor’s regular expenses and needs and having to apply for
funding on a constant basis can be very time consuming. On the other hand due to the
enormous initial investment needed just to set the website up and create an operative business
structure it is almost impossible at this point to think that such a project is going to generate
enough revenue to cover its own expenses, and obviously it is completely out of the question to
generate profits. These are the reasons that prompted the directing team to start re-
conceptualising the platform and its funding model, re-branding it from being a film distribution
company to become an NGO aimed at archiving and promoting Spanish experimental cinema.
This implies not only acknowledging what HAMACA does but also what it is: for the first time
there is an online database with information about almost 200 Spanish video artists fully
accessible: about 900 works have been digitalized (so preserved) and a large number of works
have been translated and subtitled, and this will help Spanish video art to be consumed abroad.
The amount of information about Spanish video contained in the website can not be gathered
elsewhere and HAMACA has worked or collaborated with members of academia, curators,
artists, designers, programmers etc. generating an important number of externalities, but more
importantly generating a strong cultural network. Its social impact is difficult to quantify but
there is no doubt about how the sector is starting to benefit from this intermediary; with profits
of over 360.000 euros in 2009, many artists are benefiting from the initiative. HAMACA is also
becoming a reference point for researchers and scholars willing to know more about Spanish
video art.
I started talking with Rubén whilst having a drink at our regular bar; without thinking about it
too much I fired: “HAMACA is a NGO…”. I knew this would trigger a response because
Rubén has always been a business orientated person and he has never liked this idea; but I think
he understood what I meant. Rubén knows that a project like this needs to be state-funded but
he would prefer to envisage HAMACA as a private enterprise able to live from its commercial
activities. But the fact that HAMACA is actually taking over state competences (preserving
artworks, promoting Spanish art, creating art histories etc.) contributes to the complexity of this
project’s definition. “Ok, I agree that we function as an NGO and we are protecting and
promoting a specific cultural sector that would be seriously threatened without the work we
carry out, but I don’t like the idea and we could never pull this one in order to open up for new
sources of funding”. But we are not only discussing sources of funding, HAMACA is
increasingly doing things that museums should be doing. They have the biggest collection of
video art so far compiled in Spain, they have preserved and made digital copies of the most
31Including money from the local council, Catalan Government, ministry of culture and several other
funding bodies.
65
important experimental films in Spanish history, have become a central hub for researchers and
provide an income to a number of video artists. Museum curators are sending researchers and
historians to HAMACA’s HQs as it has more information about the history of video and
experimental cinema than any other public institution, even though this is a privately run
enterprise. Under the pressure of neoliberal reforms public institutions are relying ever more on
these types of projects, which technically aren’t NGOs but operate as such in practice. They are
one of the stepping stones towards privatization. They do not produce content any more, but
instead they provide services for different public institutions and agencies and they operate
between the state and society.
Interfacing the State
In Brazil, a country hard hit by neoliberal reforms put in place by Collor de Mello, most of the
public cultural institutions were directly eliminated when he was elected as president. This way
the Consejo Nacional de Derecho Autoral (CNDA), Embrafilme (Brazilian film institute) or
Funarte (National Art Foundation) disappeared leaving funding in the hands of private
sponsorship (YProductions, 2009). Even the Ministry of Culture lost its status and was
transformed into a Secretaria General, an institution dependent on the Secretary of State.
Culture was conceived as a tool for propaganda and it was not until the next president arrived,
Cardoso, that the Lei Rouanet was put into place, a powerful tax deduction scheme for
companies who invest in culture. For almost ten years this was almost the only way to get
funding for cultural initiatives in Brazil. The government receives the money from private
enterprises and relocates it in cultural projects that manage to pass through many layers of
bureaucracy, revisions and interviews. This clearly puts smaller and independent projects at a
disadvantage as they cannot allocate enough time and resources to complete all the forms and
steps that it takes to access funds from the Lei Rouanet. When I was doing my field work in
Brazil the two last initiatives to get funding were the Cirque du Soleil and Madonna’s concert in
Sao Paulo; both examples are self-explanatory.
In this context a number of small companies have emerged specializing in getting artists and
small cultural enterprises through the different stages and hurdles in the race to access this
public/private32 funding. I had the chance to interview Ricardo Fernandes (Kbelo), an event
organizer and DJ who now runs Kratonton, a consulting agency that helps to re-brand and
assess artists willing to get public funding. Their mission is very clear, transforming cultural
32This constitutes a very interesting discussion, as really what companies are doing is deciding
indirectly how they promote themselves through these cultural events. In most cases they decide not to
support critical or smaller projects, as they seek visibility.
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projects into appealing investments for the companies operating through the Rouanet scheme.
Kbelo describes public agencies as “slow, bureaucratic and ineffective” and the civil servants
that work in them as “people without any kind of cultural knowledge, they just treat all
proposals as equal, they can’t distinguish or tell the difference between an interesting project and
something that has been done many times before”. In this sense he believe he is improving the
State by refining proposals, making them more appealing for corporate sponsors and providing
artists with a language that bureaucrats can understand. In this process of “state improvement”
he obviously makes money as he takes a commission from the successful proposals and always
takes a fee in advance.
This does not constitute an isolated case. I also had a chance to meet Fabio de Sa Cesnik, from
Cesnik Abogados, a law firm specializing in working projects through the Rouanet scheme. He
has created a very unorthodox firm comprised of lawyers, culture researchers and artists, who
transform proposals into successful funding recipients. One of their most successful projects
was the movie “City of Gods”, which they helped to get funding. They later managed the film’s
IP rights and managed the economic aspects of the movie. What’s interesting in both cases is
how they envisaged the failure of the State as a market niche, the inability of public institutions
to understand cultural production as a space in which to operate and provide specific services.
Far from being content producers, we see how the neoliberalisation of the economy has given
birth to a set of cultural enterprises that operate in the spaces opened-up with the progressive
withdrawal of the state. In most cases these companies provide spaces in which public
institutions, private interests and social dynamics can interface. They devour the remains of the
nation state and give birth to business architectures that operate following private directives but
look like NGOs. Cover public functions but lack accountability, but still, they are very cool.
Conclusions
Throughout this chapter we have seen how the notion of the “culture industry” has
progressively shifted from being a critical concept to become an economic development model.
By using the future tense, the “cultural industries” became a popular tool for urban regeneration
and a powerful discourse on the importance of culture for the economy. With the arrival of the
“creative industries” and the centrality of intellectual property as the apparatus to extract value
from creative and cultural work, we see how a governmental model is introduced. This
promotes the individual capture of common flows of knowledge and its privatization. Whilst
traditionally the focus has been put on describing enterprises that produce creative contents, we
have seen how a different set of enterprises has grown. In this case they provide services and
occupy the spaces left by the withdrawal of the state. I have shown how this process comes as a
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natural consequence of the increasing neoliberalisation of the economy. The creative industries
constitute a powerful element in this process. In the following chapter I intend to analyze a key
aspect that seems to be absent in most of the studies on the creative industries: where do these
companies pool their ideas and knowledge from? To do so I will introduce the notion of the
“cultural commons” and show how there is a growing tension between the neoliberal model
that most creative enterprises follow in which social production is seen as a resource to exploit
individually and those models that advocate for a collective exploitation of common resources.
This discussion will open a new space between what we consider the public and private spheres
in which interesting business and political models are emerging.
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Chapter Three.
The Cultural Commons
69
Primary material exceeds transformed finished products. The
transformer, producer, inventor, delves into the common, which is
always in sufficient quantity. The parasite seeks rarity.
Michel Serres, The Parasite
As we have seen in the first chapter, some authors consider that the raw material that serves as
the basis and shapes the forms of production that take place in the creative industries is
composed of ideas, inventions, knowledge and affects that are constantly being (re)produced
through processes of social cooperation. In this chapter I will claim, following the insights of
authors such as Yann Moulier-Boutang, Lewis Hyde or James Boyle, that this collective
knowledge, the general intellect that shapes production, is a form of contemporary commons.
In this sense, the widespread growth of regulations aimed at enforcing intellectual property can
be considered a contemporary form of enclosure of the commons. I will explore notions such as
primitive accumulation, or the commons and their enclosures, in order to suggest that we are
undergoing a new stage of enclosure. In this case what is being privatized is not land, water or
wood but instead we are gradually losing access to collectively produced knowledge. I will argue
that if the rise of capitalism was made possible by the accumulation of land and labour power
provided by the dispossession of the means of subsistence, we are now undergoing a process of
primitive accumulation that will enable the development of cognitive capitalism. The creative
industries have a very important role to play in this process as their production model is based
on capturing common knowledge and transforming it into commodities. I will discuss the
implications of this process to finally analyze some of the social movements that have appeared
recently as an attempt to revert this process.
Primitive Accumulation
Karl Marx addresses and explores the consequences of the notion of primitive accumulation in
two key chapters in Capital’s Volume One. In its pages Marx makes a strong case arguing that
we need to recognize the importance of this primitive stage of accumulation in order to
understand the conditions that enabled capitalism to develop into the dominant mode of
production known to all. The so-called process of primate accumulation33 cannot be conceived
as a clean and linear progression, but as an array of events that enabled large sums of capital and
labour-force to be obtained and therefore to be transformed into surplus-value. In the views of
the Italian scholar Silvia Federici, the notion of primitive accumulation “provides a common
33In some translations the original term ursprünglich has been translated as original accumulation, this
has caused some dispute in Marxist circles.
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denominator through which we can conceptualize the changes that the advent of capitalism
produced in economic and social relations”(Federici, 2004:12). Some of these changes
contemplate the enclosure of the commons, the expansion of witch-hunting that killed and
expropriated the lands of thousands of women in Europe and South America, the rise of slavery
or the colonization of non-western countries. The combination of these events allowed a
transformation of the ruling classes in Europe, the proletarization of large masses of workers,
the expropriation of land and wealth from European and non-European peasants, the
introduction of systematic terror as a form of ruling and more importantly the founding of a
hegemonic economic model: capitalism. As Federici points out “Marx introduced the concept
of primitive accumulation at the end of Capital Volume 1 to describe the social and economic
restructuring that the European ruling class initiated in response to its accumulation crisis, and
to establish that: (i) capitalism could not have developed without a prior concentration of capital
and labour, and that (ii) the divorcing of the workers from the means of production, not the
abstinence of the rich, is the source of capitalist wealth”(Federici, 2004:63).
Karl Marx describes clearly how this process of accumulation occurred and the importance it
has for understanding the origins of a capitalist mode of production. Chapter 26 of Capital’s
Volume One is devoted to exploring the notion. In his own words, “we have seen how money
is changed into capital; how through capital surplus-value is made, and from surplus-value more
capital. But the accumulation of capital pre-supposes surplus-value; surplus-value pre-supposes
capitalistic production; capitalistic production presupposes the pre-existence of considerable
masses of capital and of labour-power in the hands of producers of commodities. The whole
movement, therefore, seems to turn in a vicious circle, out of which we can only get by
supposing a primitive accumulation (previous accumulation by Adam Smith) preceding
capitalistic accumulation; an accumulation not the result of the capitalistic mode of production,
but its starting point”(Marx, 2004:873). Marx makes it clear that this process of accumulation
does not follow a clear and smoothly paved path but is based on violence, extortion, resistance
and protest. The German scholar admits that the methods deployed to trigger this process are
anything but idyllic; the origins of capitalism, in contrast to the description provided by the
mercantilists, is full of blood and struggles. Classical economy has tried to provide a clean
narrative of the origins of capitalism in which workers decided to start working as waged
labourers following a rational decision. As the American economist and historian Michael
Perelman puts it “the brutal acts associated with the process of stripping the majority of the
people of the means of producing for themselves might seem far removed from the laissez-faire
reputation of classical political economy. In reality, the dispossession of the majority of the
people and the construction of laissez-faire are closely connected, so much so that Marx, or at
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least his translators, called this expropriation of the masses, ‘primitive accumulation.’ ”
(Perelman, 2001:1).
In a similar line, Karl Marx explicitly defines the process of primitive accumulation as “nothing
else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It
appears as primitive, because it forms the pre-historic stage of capital and of the mode of
production corresponding with it” (Marx, 2004:875). Powerful measures were put in place to
favour the emergence of this new proletariat: amongst others, peasants were dispossessed from
their means of subsistence, they were forced to accept waged labour and laws such as the
“bloody legislation” made sure proletarians would not look for alternatives. In short, they were
forcefully pushed towards the capitalist mode of production. Blood was poured and a vast array
of coercive (thus violent) measures were put into place in order to make peasants comply and
change their ways of life for ever after. This is the moment in which Marx determines that for
the first time a mass of proletarian workers were obliged to sell their labour power for wages in
order to guarantee their subsistence. As Marx notes, by no means was this a voluntary process
but was fuelled by the hunger and needs of thousands of dispossessed peasants. In his own
words “these new freed men became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all
their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal
arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in
letters of blood and fire”(Marx, 2004:875).
As we can see, this state of primitive accumulation supposed a radical change in the livelihoods
of thousands of European peasants who would suffer the expropriation of land and soil that
until that moment provided the basis of their subsistence. Waged labour was seen as a degrading
activity that very few peasants were willing to endure (Linebaugh, 2008). Several measures were
taken in order to force peasant to start working for a wages; one of the most visible was the
enclosure of the commons. In chapter twenty-seven Marx defines how the commons were
gradually enclosed, separating peasants from their means of subsistence. This process had
important consequences, especially bearing in mind the large amounts of population that
depended on the soil for their subsistence. As Marx points out “in England, serfdom had
practically disappeared in the last part of the 14th century. The immense majority of the
population consisted then, and to a still larger extent, in the 15th century, of free peasant
proprietors, whatever was the feudal title under which their right of property was hidden”(Marx,
2004:877). This situation changed dramatically when the “great feudal lords created an
incomparably larger proletariat by the forcible driving of the peasantry from the land, to which
the latter had the same feudal right as the lord himself, and by the usurpation of the common
lands”(Marx. 2004:878). One can argue that this process occurred on a gradual basis and during
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many years. Direct and indirect measures coincided and were deployed during two centuries,
changing forever the face of the land and the ways in which the European countryside was a
source of wealth and wellbeing for thousands of peasants. One of the many contributing factors
to the “the process of forcible expropriation of the people in the 16th century with a new and
frightful impulse from the Reformation, and from the consequent colossal spoliation of the
church property”(Marx, 2004:881). But without doubt the enclosure of the commons, that
occurred after the Parliamentary Act for Enclosures of the Commons was passed, constituted
one of the most important blows to traditional and communal forms of living amongst peasant
communities.
The enclosure of the commons, far from being a European historical anecdote, constituted the
first step of a global process aimed at dispossessing workers of their means of subsistence. As
the Marxist historian Peter Linebaugh reminds us “Indian famine joined the English enclosures,
the American frontier, the Scottish clearances, African slavery, and the Irish famine as historical
synecdoches of primitive accumulation when terror accompanied the brutal separation from the
means of subsistence”(Linebaugh, 2008:147).So, clearly we must understand the enclosure of
the commons as a global phenomenon that laid the basis of a defined mode of production and
reproduction of the lives of millions of workers in the world: capitalism. In this sense, and
following Perelman’s ideas we see how “primitive accumulation consisted of two parts that we
might compare to the two blades of a scissors. The first blade served to undermine the ability of
people to provide for themselves. The other blade was a system of stern measures required to
keep people from finding alternative survival strategies outside of the system of waged
labor”(Perelman, 2001:8). The foundations of a capitalist mode of production had been laid out
and this process had very important consequences not only in the ways people organized
production but also in the ways in which communal ways of living gave place to individualized
subjective positions.
The Commons
In order to discuss the pertinence of the need to compare the traditional physical commons to
the contemporary notion of the commons as proposed by some Marxist and legal scholars, I
first want to discuss in depth the origins and function of the traditional commons. I will argue
that these do not only encompass a production system or a form of distribution of certain
resources but they also imply a whole array of social behaviours, forms of cooperation, a sense
of community and a source of political power. The commons consisted in plots of land, forests,
meadows, lakes, pastures, rivers etc. that were not privately owned but exploited collectively by
local communities. They had to design exploitation systems in order not to exhaust the
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resources but also had to keep the commons safe from free riders, ensure the continuity of the
species held in the commons and distribute the wealth extracted from these commons on a fair
basis. As Silvia Federici notes, these commons “provided crucial resources for the peasant
economy (wood for fuel, timber for building, fishponds, grazing grounds for animals) and
fostered community cohesion and cooperation”(Federici, 2004:24). The centrality of the
commons and their importance in order to understand the livelihood of peasant communities
cannot be underestimated: the commons provided the basic elements any human being needed
to ensure their subsistence but also implied sophisticated political arrangements designed to
bind the communities to its commons 34. Cooperation was central to the maintenance of the
commons, so basic agreements had to be met in order to ensure the protection of these
resources.
The possibility to access such diverse sets of resources meant that peasant communities had a
great degree of autonomy, as their basic food and energy needs were always satisfied. This was
truly empowering as these communities could always have access to food, wood (to build
shacks, to keep warm) and pastures to feed their animals. As Federici argues, “having the
effective use and possession of a plot of land meant that the serfs could always support
themselves and, even at the peak of their confrontations with the lords, they could not easily be
forced to bend because of the fear of starvation”(Federici, 2004:24). Commoners experienced
self-reliance, and this independence was important in order to understand their political power.
In this sense, being able to ensure the continuity of the commons meant being able to ensure
the livelihood of entire communities that fed themselves, and their cattle, on the commons. This
fact enabled forms of political self-organization based on local assemblies, perambulations and
collective decision making.
The commons were also spaces where peasants could enjoy leisure related activities, pagan
festivities and all kinds of celebrations were held on these common spaces. This helped to build
local communities and to enhance cooperation among commoners. Public gatherings and games
also took place on the commons (Neeson, 1996), and pagan rituals and ceremonies were also
hosted at the commons. This helps to understand why these places were so central to everyday
medieval life. Perelman also reminds us that “although their standard of living may not have
been particularly lavish, the people of pre-capitalistic northern Europe, like most traditional
people, enjoyed a great deal of free time” (Perelman, 2001:10). This is one of the reasons why
waged labour was despised and seen as a form of slavery. Perelman goes on arguing that “in the
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, about one-third of the working days, including
34
For a deeper engagement with the importance of these economies of subsistence its worth seeing
Marshall Sahlins’ ‘Stone Age Economics’.
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Sundays, were spent in leisure” (Perelman, 2001:10), which meant time spent in the commons
reproducing social bonds. There is a widespread belief that peasant communities needed to
spend almost all their time working in order to satisfy their food and energy resources, but this
was never the case (Sahlins 1977) and the cooperative nature of the exploitation of the
commons was one of the reasons why the expenditure of so much labour force was not needed.
The rights to the commons were contemplated in the Charter of the Forest, a legal document
that accompanied the Magna Carta that did not only protect the commons but ensured peasants
could rely on them in order to have access to basic resources (Linebaugh, 2008). The charter
pointed out the different rights peasants had over the commons; Peter Linebaugh describes the
essential activities and terms that defined what could be carried out on the commons, where you
had the right to “herbage, which is common of pasture like, agistment, which permitted
livestock to roam in the forest. Pannage is the right to let the pigs in to get acorns and beech
mast. Assarts and swidden are aspects of arable tillage. Firebote, snap wood, turbary, lops and
tops refer to fuel. Estovers, cartbote, and housebote refer to tools and building. Chiminage
refers to transportation” (Linebaugh , 2008:43). What is interesting to bear in mind at this point
is the notion of the commons as a set of resources over which one has certain exploitation
rights and certain obligations. The commons are built on commoning, they do not precede the
forms of organization designed to manage them. As we will see later on, intellectual property
also consists on a set of rights one has over intangible assets. I will discuss the materialization of
these assets not only through law and legislation but also through their management and
reproduction. It is important to think of the commons not so much as the set of units one can
extract from a common resource pool but as the production of forms of cooperation and
community that enables this extraction. Economic sciences Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom
has studied the contemporary commons and describes them as a three layered reality. In order
for a commons to exist there must be a resource (tangible or intangible), a community to
manage this resource and finally a set of rules designed to manage it. If either three of these
elements cease to exist we can no longer define this reality as a commons (Ostrom, 1990).
Enclosures
In the mid 16th century a series of changes threatened the survival and the mere existence of the
commons as they have been known until then. These were being fenced up and the access to
the commons was being restricted, preventing whole villages and communities to enter these
communal places. As Federici acknowledges “enclosure” was a technical term, indicating a set
of strategies the English Lords and rich farmers used to eliminate communal land property and
expand their holdings” (Federici, 2004:69). These acts of enclosure were supported by several
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economic theories that challenged the basic assumptions that underlined the commons, “the
argument proposed by modernizers from all political perspectives, is that the enclosures boosted
agricultural efficiency, and the dislocations they produce were well compensated by a significant
increase in agricultural productivity” (Federici, 2004:70). This discourse is currently being
deployed in order to justify mass expropriation, the privatization of public resources and the
enclosure of traditional agricultural land (Federici 2001, Midnight Notes Collective 2001).
This movement had disastrous consequences for peasant communities that saw how their basic
sources of subsistence, that is access to food, water, wood and pastures for their livestock,
suddenly stopped being available. The enclosures, that started in England but soon affected the
commons of the whole of Europe, occurred gradually and many factors contributed to this
process, the seizure and dissolving of the monasteries and the protestant reform also helped to
enclose massive portions of land. In this sense Linebaugh reminds us that “enclosures were not
the only force in the creation of the land market but they destroyed the spiritual claim on the
soil and prepared for the proletarianization of the common people, subjecting them to
multifaceted labour discipline: the elimination of cakes and ales, the elimination of sports, the
shunning of dance, the abolition of festivals, and the strict discipline over the male and female
bodies” (Linebaugh, 2008:52). The disappearance of the commons had obvious social
consequences for the communities that until that moment had depended on them for their
survival, as suddenly the main locations for socialization were being closed down, the locus of
their cooperation and social articulation was suddenly being fenced up. The dispossession of
their source of food and energy forced many peasants to go out and search for new sources of
wealth; this is one of the many factors in order to understand the emergence of a mass of
proletarian workers ready to sell their labour power in order to survive. Poverty and loss of
social cohesion pushed many peasants to look for new places to live, abandoning their villages
and searching for work in bigger towns. But peasants were extremely reluctant to take on waged
work and, as Linebaugh argues, “this explains the growth in the wake of the enclosures (using
the term in a broad sense to include all forms of land privatization), of the number of
vagabonds and masterless men, who preferred to take to the road and risk enslavement or
death-as prescribed by the ‘bloody legislation’ passed against them - rather than to work for a
wage” (Linebaugh, 2008:72).
Protests and struggles against the enclosures took place all around Europe, fences were torn
down and peasants repeatedly trespassed the now-private lands in search for food, wood or
water. These offences were violently confronted by the authorities and large numbers of
protesters were killed during these fights. Lewis Hyde describes how “with the advent of
parliamentary enclosure, the old harmony between law and custom broke down and village
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perambulations necessarily took on an extralegal air. Often they turned into riots, and regularly
they had to deal not with literal encroachments but with the abstract fences and hedges of the
bureaucratic state” (Hyde, 2010:39)
At the time, many measures were taken and legislation was passed in order to keep peasants out
of the commons and pushing them to become waged labourers. Linebaugh notes that “the
rebellions could not be defeated by terror alone, which was amply illustrated by the Sturdy
Beggars Act of 1547 making slavery a punishment for vagabondage, but the state itself
intervened to regulate the pace of the enclosure and the ‘freedom’ of the market. Thus the legal
bulwark of Tudor paternalism familiar to us as “the moral economy” (Linebaugh, 2008:60).
Mercantilism couldn’t conceive the idea of people wasting their labour force, idleness was
criminalized, vagabonds were treated as criminals and a whole discursive machinery was enacted
in order to impose wage labour (Foucault, 1979). These are the origins of capitalism that run on
the accumulation of surplus value extracted from the newly created proletarians desperate to
earn some income in order to feed themselves and their families.
It is worth noting that the enclosure of the commons affected women very heavily, as in their
case they did not have the option of recurring to other forms of paid labour, as the moral
restrictions of the time didn’t envisage or permit female labour. Federici argues that “women
were also more negatively impacted by the enclosures because as soon as land was privatized
and monetary relations began to dominate economic life they found it more difficult than men
to support themselves being increasingly confined to reproductive labour at the very time that
this labour was being completely devalued” (Federici, 2004:74). Linebaugh adds “the loss of
power with regard to wage employment led to the massification of prostitution” (2008:94).
Women were forced to accept marriage and dependence on their male partners in order to
subsist or sell their bodies as the only way to find a source of income. Until the enclosures
women depended heavily on the commons, which gave them autonomy and enough supplies to
keep themselves alive. The enclosure was a great biopolitical blow to women all across Europe
that lost their power and political autonomy. Soon after, prostitution become demonized and in
many cases prohibited, pushing women to depend further on men to be able to survive. Federici
argues that the witch hunt constituted another way to dispossess women from not only their
lands and belongings but also an effective method to dispose them from their knowledge. “With
the persecution of the folk healer, women were expropriated from a patrimony of empirical
knowledge, regarding herbs and healing remedies, that they had accumulated and transmitted
from generation to generation; its loss paving the way for a new form of enclosure: the rise of
professional medicine, which erected in front of the “lower classes” a wall of unchallengeable
scientific knowledge, unaffordable and alien, despite its curative pretences” (Federici, 2004:201).
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This is an important fact to consider as again we see that the commons were not only the
physical spaces where peasants gathered in search of food or energy, but also consisted in the
local knowledge and political articulations invented to preserve the commons. Popular
knowledge on the properties of the plants, on moon cycles or on ways to improve the harvest
were key elements for the preservation of the commons. Once this knowledge disappeared the
commons were truly lost. The commons were not the physical spaces but the collective
knowledge generated in order to sustain and look after these places. In this sense the commons
are a combination of material and immaterial elements, or as Linebaugh argues, the commons
must “exist in both juridical forms and day-to-day material reality“(2008:6). In this line, and
escaping from the notion of the commons as a pre-existent reality, Linebaugh clearly notes that
“to speak of the commons as if it were a natural resource is misleading at best and dangerous at
worst - the commons is an activity and, if anything, it expresses relationships in society that are
inseparable from relations to nature. It might be better to keep the word as a verb, an activity,
rather than as a noun, a substantive” (2008:279).
In conclusion we see that the enclosure of the commons had disastrous effects for local
communities and was a key element to understand primitive accumulation. The emergence of a
mass of proletarian workers and the privatization of the land were decisive elements for the later
development of capitalism. Linebaugh puts it in the following terms “the enclosure movement
and the slave trade ushered industrial capitalism into the modern world. By 1832 England was
largely closed, its countryside privatized, in contrast to a century earlier when its fields were
largely open and yeomen, children, women can subsist by commoning” (Linebaugh, 2008:94).
Expelled commoners and the captured Africans provided a great amount of the labour power
needed to fuel the factories that emerged all over the world. We can not understand the growth
and progression of capitalism without considering these key factors and reflecting on their social
and political dimensions. The commons constitute an example of cooperation and social
empowerment; they are a source of wealth but also a repository of knowledge and ideas that can
be freely used by the commoners. Following these ideas, now let’s engage in the ways some
scholars have argued that we are currently facing a movement of enclosure of a new set of
commons: immaterial commons.
Contemporary Commons: Creative Basins, Public Domain and Externalities
As we saw in chapter one, with the advent of cognitive capitalism new forms of production and
sources of wealth have emerged. These new configurations go way beyond the factory walls and
breed on a heterogeneous conglomerate of subjects that inhabit the city and that have the
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potential to generate inventions35 through communicative processes. Authors related to the
French journal Multitudes branded these spontaneous spaces for cooperation and realization of
collective potential as “creative basins”. The first references to the concept are found in the
article ‘Le bassin de travail inmatériel dans la métropole parisienne’ of 1996, written by
Antonella Corsani, Maurizio Lazzarato and Antonio Negri. For the first time these scholars
started deploying the notion of “cooperation basins of immaterial labour” as a way to describe
those pockets of creativity and cooperation that lie in the middle of the contemporary cities.
This definition emphasizes the fact that both factories and businesses have been superseded by
forms of knowledge and creativity that reach beyond their limits, again trying to understand the
ways in which the general intellect functions and provides a framework to understand the
productive processes that take part in contemporary capitalism. Enterprises tap into these basins
in order to access information, trends, ideas and inventions. In this sense, these basins constitute
a form of contemporary commons, the new languages, ideas or inventions produced collectively
are extremely generative and these can lead to new forms of sociality, new grammars, new
rhymes and forms of political articulation, but also constitute the raw resource on which private
enterprises such as the creative industries exploit as if they were raw productive materials.
Contemporary commons are no longer comprised of rivers, meadows or forests; these new
commons emerge in the interstices of the city, in spaces in which people socialize and exchange
information, in street corners (Jacobs 1972), spaces in which new languages are articulated and
new words branded. These commons are fuelled by the internet and the social cooperation it
enables. In order to understand this new reality, that entity that has been branded as the social
must be understood not as a macro-element but as a proliferation of relations at different levels,
whose complementary nature supports the generation of these processes of immaterial
collaboration, a social factory and a site of social cooperation. In reference to this, the Spanish
researcher and activist Emmanuel Rodríguez adds that “the notion of the metropolis as a
conglomeration of heterogeneous subjects, capable of potentially inferring a greater power of
innovation and creation, requires a molecular approach to describe social relations in terms of
cooperation, and hence, of labour” (Rodríguez, 2007: 198). Intellectual property constitutes the
new framing or enclosure of these creative basins. I will examine this idea and its implications in
the following page. The other way to fully grasp the extent of the wealth and possible value of
these processes of social cooperation is by analyzing it in terms of externalities.
35I want to make a clear distinction here between inventions and innovation. Following Gabriel Tarde
(1890), inventions are those ideas, insights or possibilities that haven’t hit the market, whilst innovation
implies the valorization and marketization of these inventions. In this sense we could argue that an
innovation is an actualized invention.
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This analytical tool, first developed by the British classical economist Alfred Marshall, helps to
understand the indirect benefits or damages derived from an economic activity. The French
theorist and director of the Multitudes journal Yann Moulier-Boutang defines externalities in the
following manner: “when an economic exchange between two agents, A and B, has effects on a
third agent, C, without an economic transaction between A and C or B and C, we can call those
effects an externality”( Moulier-Boutang, 2004:147). There can be positive externalities (when
the transaction generates benefits on a third party) or negative externalities (when the activity
damages or produces an inconvenient to a third party). Moulier-Boutang believes that the
creative basins are a very rich source of positive externalities that get captured by the city, by
corporations or by third agents who benefit from these spaces of creativity and invention. He,
along with many other scholars, believes these benefits should be measured and taken into
account in order to understand the importance of these basins. The best way to calculate the
economic dimension of these processes of cooperation is by using externalities. In Moulier-
Boutang’s words, “externalities provides economic theory, which has always struggled to define
interdependency, with a set of tools to understand the problems derived from the exchange and
coordination of complex systems in which there are unrequited payments or price has not been
established by the market” (2004:148). Following the biological example that the economist
James Meade first used (on how bee keeping generates benefits on the fields that surround the
hives) Moulier-Boutang’s latest book (L’abeille et l’économiste) addresses the issue of externalities
and uses the metaphor of pollination as a way to describe the benefits derived from the creative
basins in society. These can only be determined by analyzing them as externalities.
Far removed from the post autonomist Marxists we also find many legal scholars that argue that
culture constitutes a new kind of commons that is currently under threat of privatization and
endangered by the market. I am referring to authors such as Lawrence Lessig, James Boyle,
Yochai Benkler, David Bollier, Lewis Hyde or Bill Ivey. Central to their ideas is the rediscovery
of the public domain, a legal classification of all those works whose copyright has expired. In the
theories on the creative basins we have seen that the notion of cooperation is a central element
to the reformulation of the immaterial commons; in the following examples all the emphasis has
been put on defining the legal terms in which these commons are inscribed. The American
writer and activist David Bollier writes “for decades, the public domain was regarded as
something of a wasteland, a place where old books, faded posters, loopy music from the early
twentieth century, and boring government reports go to die. It was a dump on the outskirts of
respectable culture” (Bollier, 2008:42). The public domain had lost interest for legal scholars
who focused all their work and attention to study copyright protected products, leaving the
public domain out of the academic scope. James Boyle, legal academic and co-founder of the
Centre for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University helps us to understand further
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the nature of the public domain which he defines as “the material that is not covered by
intellectual property rights. Material might be in the public domain because it was never capable
of being owned. Examples would be the English language or the formulae of Newtonian
physics. Alternatively, something might be in the public domain because rights have expired
(2008:38). It was not until 1981 that the legal scholar David Lange wrote an article named
‘Recognizing the Public Domain’ that a number of law students started getting interested in and
started working on the public domain, valorizing it and noting its importance and significance
for the production of culture. Within a short period of time other scholars such as Jessica
Litman started acknowledging that the public domain constituted a new kind of commons, but
in this case it was comprised by all the ideas, inventions, songs, scientific discoveries and all
those forms of knowledge no longer covered by copyright. As Boyle argues, in this case “the
term ‘commons’ is generally used to denote a resource over which a group has access and use
rights - albeit perhaps under certain conditions. It is used in even more ways than the term
‘public domain’ ”(2008:39). These new commons are extremely generative as they constitute the
past bricks on which cultures have been built, but also they provide new threads to follow in the
research for cultural identities, scientific discoveries or languages. The poet and scholar Lewis
Hyde describes the cultural commons as “that vast store of unowned ideas, inventions, and
works of art that we have inherited form the past and continue to enrich”(Hyde, 2010:18).
These commons are comprised of musical standards, narrative structures, literary jewels, folk
culture, myths, oral and written histories and all those forms of culture that have escaped the
logic imposed by the markets.
These commons provide the basis for creativity, as any new song that is written will seek
inspiration in the history of music, each book written will comprise grammatical structures
established by previous authors, each new film will rely on the cinematographic language
developed by preceding directors etc. In this sense, these commons are extremely important to
our current creators who will be able to stand on the shoulders of creative people that have
preceded them. Boyle states that a commons based creativity is a “creativity that builds on an
open-resource available to all. An additional component of some definitions is that the results of
the creativity must be fed back into the commons for all to use” (2008:16). But these cultural
commons are constantly being threatened by copyright and its lobbyers, who push legislations
to further extend the width and copyright extensions. The market’s aim is to stop cultural items
going into the public domain, ensuring expected future profits from these commodities. Some
of the clearest examples of commons-based creativity are constituted by Disney movies, which
in most cases have tapped into the public domain for stories that they later turned into films
such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Pinocchio, Cinderella, Robin Hood or the Jungle
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Book36, among others. In that sense Lessig reminds us that “Disney’s great genius, his spark of
creativity, was built upon the work of others” (2004:20). This fact, using the public domain as a
reservoir of ideas, has been deployed by the industry in search of ideas or inventions to be
turned into commodities. The former chairman of the NEA, Bill Ivey writes “Of course, DVDs
and to an extent CDs have created an outlet for all sorts of exotic offerings, including obscure
classical and pop recordings, old radio and TV shows, and historical and foreign films. The
trick, of course, is that DVDs are a prime symptom of America’s fast-emerging multitiered arts
consumption system, a system that offers ever-expanding choice to well-heeled, knowledgeable
niche consumers while draining content from the cultural commons” (Ivey, 2008:161). The
most evident problem affecting the cultural commons has just been clearly exposed; the creative
industries in their constant search of difference (Lash and Lury 2007) have recurred to the
public domain in search of “inspiration” but at the same time, these enterprises are highly
reluctant to return their films, songs, designs and ideas to the public domain.
New Enclosures
As it happened to the traditional commons in the 16th and 17th centuries, the cultural commons,
are under threat of enclosure. The expansion of copyright is jeopardizing the growth of the
commons that see how private interests and corporations are expanding copyright terms. This
had lead to what some scholars to coin the phrase “copyright wars” (Boyle 2008, Lessig 2004
and 2008) to define the struggle between public domain advocates willing to limit the length of
copyright against the interests of lobbyists and private enterprises willing to extend the scope
and length of copyright legislation. In recent years some very restrictive policies have been
passed in the U.S such as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act in 1998 or the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1996; these have threatened the public domain by
retrospectively extending copyright length up to 70 years after the death of the author, which
implies that all those works generated from 1928 up to present time will remain copyrighted and
the access to these works restricted by the market (Lessig 2004). Some creative industries
advocates and lobbyists argue that strong copyright frameworks promote innovation and the
work of the creators, but it is hard to defend that this can be done retrospectively, as Lessig has
denounced.
These events have propitiated that some authors start talking of “a second enclosure
movement”(Boyle, 2008:45) or a second stage of primitive accumulation (Moulier-Boutang
2004). Copyright threatens to enclose the cultural commons, which constitute the source of
36 See Linebaugh’s account on the Jungle Book and its relation to the commons in (Linebaugh 2008).
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wealth and value for thousands of cognitive and creative workers. It is in this context that we
can understand how David Bollier writes that “each intellectual property right, in effect, fences
off some portion of the public domain, making it unavailable to future creators” (2008:64). The
impossibility to access and use certain words, colours, languages or styles constitutes a serious
problem to the multitudes ready to recombine, mix and develop new styles, designs, grammars
or politics. Corporations trademark certain expression (just do it), colours (orange), melodies
(jingles) or specific designs (logos) (Lury 2004), trying to protect their corporate image from
being replicated by their competitors, but by doing so they prevent creators to recombine
further these elements in search of ‘new’ languages, designs etc. The film and music industries
have started battles against P2P systems (see the Grokster or Morpheus cases) demonizing peers
for sharing contents amongst each other. Corporations such as Sony, Apple Inc. or Microsoft
devised and deployed Digital Rights Management systems (DRM) in their products in an
attempt to limit their distribution and reproduction (Lessig 2004). Items were encrypted and
hardware and software designed in order to detect those commodities that hadn’t been encoded.
Apple Inc’s iTunes shop, for a short period of time only, sold encoded music that could only be
performed on certain equipment, but this technological battle was quickly lost; opposition to the
system pushed corporation to stop using this technology. James Boyle has referred to these
control systems as “the barbed wire” (Boyle 2008, 86) of contemporary culture;, they are the
fences that try to enclose our contemporary commons.
Lawrence Lessig has written extensively on the problems derived from implementing new forms
of regulation. Digital technologies have enabled forms of control unknown until the time. As he
states “copyright’s duration has increased dramatically—tripled in the past thirty years. And
copyright’s scope has increased as well—from regulating only publishers to now regulating just
about everyone. And copyright’s reach has changed, as every action becomes a copy and hence
presumptively regulated. And as technologists find better ways to control the use of content,
and as copyright is increasingly enforced through technology” (2004:162). Bill Ivey also
denounces the ways in which copyright has become an obstacle and impediment to access our
cultural commons. He denounces the fact that a great part of our common cultural heritage is
locked up in private archives and that corporations are not willing to invest in recovering old
recordings, restore old movies or republish books with little commercial potential, but still hold
the rights to these works just in case someone is willing to use parts or ideas contained in these
cultural items. As he states “in fact, the intellectual property universe has steadily expanded its
reach over the past century, and today intellectual property law constitutes a constellation of
constraint that locks up heritage, ties the hands of creativity, and assigns a price to an ever-
widening spectrum of our expressive life”(2008:271).
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Our cultural heritage is owned and not available to creators willing to seek inspiration or ideas
from the works that have helped to define our vision of the world. The market has fenced-up a
great part of the images, sounds and ideas that have constituted our social imaginary (Lash &
Lury 2007). Ivey regrets that the governments “long ago ceded far too much authority over our
creativity and heritage to a web of commercial interests” (2008:21). He believes our expressive
life has been jeopardized by the fact that “most of America’s cultural heritage is owned by
private companies, and public policy has not been deployed to ensure responsible care and
reasonable access in regard to collections of historical assets” (2008:51). This problem is even
more notable in an era in which culture is constantly “remixed”, “mashed-up”, exchanged,
quoted and reinterpreted. As Lessig notes, we are moving into a culture of permission (Lessig
2004), a culture in which fair use is not guaranteed and in which our commons are constantly
under the threat of copyright extensions and market interests. These are some of the reasons
that move “copyfighters”, “commoners”, hackers, lawyers and activists to rethink our
intellectual property legislation in order to liberate contents and limit this second enclosure
movement. As Ivey puts it “our cultural commons will be enriched when legislation removes
copyright constraints from many thousands of works that can't be connected with owners or
that completely lack commercial potential. There are recordings, films, books, and photographs
that possess historical and cultural significance even though they can’t generate revenue.”
(2008:282)
Free Software
One of the most notable advocates of the public domain has been the activist and computer
programmer Richard Stallman founder of the Free Software movement (Stallman 2002). This
peculiar and charismatic character (to say the least) was one of the hackers that worked in the
MIT artificial intelligence lab where he faced what he considered to be the destruction of a
community and the fencing-up of another type of commons: software. One of his first major
works was EMACS, a software “which allowed users to limitlessly customize it - its wide-open
architecture encouraged people to add to it, improve it endlessly” (Levy 1984, 342). This
software fitted-in perfectly with Stallmans ethics: software was a collective and collaborative
enterprise, one should always be able to re-write it and debug it in order to fit one’s needs. But
things started to change and soon passwords were introduced into the lab; many hackers started
leaving the place tempted by entrepreneurial enterprises eager to capitalize on the software
produced collectively. As Stallman tells us “in 1981 the pioneer enterprise Symbiotics hired
almost all the hackers working at the AI Lab” (Stallman 2004, 20) and this had big consequences
for the community that had not only diminished but experienced how the software they had
produced collectively was now sold under a patent and they could no longer access its source
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code to modify it. This was not a one off case - it is well known that “Bill Gates as an
undergraduate in Harvard in the late 1970s, was almost expelled from for using publicly funded
labs to create proprietary software”(Bollier, 2008:26). During the late 1970s and early 1980s
many corporations emerged from the enclosure of software and the knowledge provided by
hacker communities that worked for publicly funded institutions. This primitive accumulation
lies at the heart of the growth of Silicon Valley and its economic growth (and bust). In some
cases these same companies sold proprietary versions of the software they had subtracted from
public institutions, as is the case of “Symbolics that had hired the cream of hackerism and had
even signed a contract to sell its machines back to MIT”(Levy 1984, 349).
Stallman decided to put an end to what he considered to be an attack to the community in
which he was brought up and he fought back the waves of privatization of software by creating
a set of programs that he licensed under what he branded as the General Public License, that is
a license that ensures that this software would always respect what he called the four basic
freedoms, that is:
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you
wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour (freedom 2).
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By
doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes.
Access to the source code is a precondition for this. (Stallman 2002, 24)
By doing so, a new kind of software was born, Free Software. This bold move was backed-up by
the generation of the first free operating system GNU/Linux, which constituted a revolution in
the computer world. Since that moment Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation which
has enabled the production of Free Software with the help of hackers from all over the world,
who have collaborated in order to write new programs, develop operating systems, applications
and so on in a clear example of social cooperation. The GPL license ensures that this software
can never be turned into proprietary software, ensuring the commons will not be fenced-up. We
cannot dismiss Free Software as a marginal or incidental reality; we must be reminded that this
software currently runs 60% of the servers that host the contents that now constitute the
internet37. We could hardly understand the architecture of the internet and the ways we interact
with each other if we were to underestimate the importance of Free Software. It constitutes a
form of digital commons that has enabled the internet to grow at the pace and to the extent that
37 See http://www.uoc.edu/activitats/docbcn/esp/docbcn.html
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we know it nowadays. Also an interesting point to bear in mind, is that Stallman has always
emphatically refused and opposed the notion of “intellectual property” as he considers it
constitutes a contradiction in terms. But it is interesting to inquire into the nature of this new
property in dispute, to think about the stuffness of this so called immaterial property.
Property: the Thingness of the Commons
It is difficult, and to a certain extent paradoxical, to make precise the material nature of
intellectual property. Anthropology has showed us that the notion of property per se has always
been a sticky and complex concept (Strathern 1999), and things get more complicated if we are
talking about immaterial or intangible property which are comprised of ideas that can be
inserted into media of expression (such as books, vinyls, canvasses, etc.) but which will always
remain ideal substances. Intellectual property legislation allows a user to do perform certain
actions with these ideas, but these regulatory frameworks vary from country to country and do
not constitute a coherent normative structure - the rights you are granted in one country can be
denied in others. In the continental legal tradition (based on the Berne Convention) moral rights
get entangled with exploitation rights perpetuating the notion of the author whilst in the
Anglo/copyright tradition moral rights disappear and an intangible object can be sold or
acquired by someone who is not the author. In the first chapter I have already addressed the
materiality of immaterial labour and formulated a critique on the notion of immaterial labour, I
now want to continue addressing the subject trying to further understand the nature of these
cultural commons. As James Boyle explains “unlike the earthy commons, the commons of the
mind are generally ‘non-rival’. Uses of land are mutually exclusive: if I am using the field for
grazing, it may interfere with your plans to use it for growing crops. By contrast, a gene
sequence, an MP3 file, or an image may be used by multiple parties; my use does not interfere
with yours” (2008:48). This fact changes dramatically the ways in which we must conceive the
nature of these forms of property. Non-rival goods open up a whole set of questions on the
notion of ownership: how can you own someone which millions of other people own? What is
the meaning of ownership when a commodity can be multiplied continually without losing any
of its qualities? These are some issues that have pushed authors such as Yochai Benkler to
describe “an economy based on networks and common peer production” in which non-rival
goods are not the exception but the rule (Benkler, 2006).
I am not trying to argue that the property of tangible or material assets is a stable condition, as
we have seen property can be a fluid quality and in no case it is engrained in the nature of the
objects. Katherine Verdery (1999) has shown that possession of land in contemporary
Transylvania doesn’t entitle the same rights to all land owners as power relations determine what
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uses can be given to plots of land. Lessig reflects on the changing nature of property when he
mentions that “at the time the Wright brothers invented the airplane, American law held that a
property owner presumptively owned not just the surface of his land, but all the land below,
down to the center of the earth, and all the space above, to “an indefinite extent, upwards”
(2004:1), this was changed by a later ruling after two farmers pressed charges against airplanes
for trespassing their property. What I want to make clear is that we cannot compare material to
immaterial property, as each category functions differently and has a complete set of different
qualities. An owner will never have the same set of rights on a tangible object as on an
immaterial asset, these operate under completely different logics, although in both cases the
notion of property is an unstable, a contingent notion. As Bollier reminds us “cultural
commons differ significantly from natural resource commons in a key respect: they are not
finite, depletable resources like pastures or forests. Online commons tend to grow in value as
more people participate, provided there is sufficient governance and common technical
standards to enable sharing. Online commons, in short, are less susceptible to the dreaded
“tragedy of the commons” and, indeed, tend to be highly generative of value. Their output does
not get “used up” the way natural resources do” (2008:141). These knowledge-based commons
have a generative quality that differentiates them from tangible commons that can be more
easily exhaustible, at least in theory. How do intangible commons get eroded? Can an
informational good be exhausted? These commons can be artificially enclosed - IP is the clearest
example of an attempt to limit abundance - but we should also consider what forms of
endurance these cultural commons come under.
The commons, as we have argued previously consist of a set of rights over a given resource; that
is, the commons cannot be owned individually. In order for a commons to be thought of as
such, it requires of a given community that it provides a framework of rights and duties over the
resource; in that sense intellectual property behaves as an intruder and as a set of regulations
alien to the communities that shape and build these commons. When these legal frameworks are
implemented the commons cease to exist. The model provided by the creative industries
consists in closing down common knowledge and transforming it into private goods,
vampirizing the commons. The creative industries transform the nature of the commons. Lewis
Hyde likes to refer to property as “a right of action”; this is the reason why he believes that
“defining property in terms of actions keeps that question open so that property is never just
some physical thing (a pencil or house), nor a person’s right of action, nor the social regime
recognizing those rights, but some combination of these joined together”(2010:26). Again we
see how the commons constitute a bundle of rights, resources and people, but never just a set of
objects.
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In the previous lines I have mentioned ‘The tragedy of the commons’ which refers to Gareth
Hardin’s 1968 article that under the same name, presented a Malthusian view of the commons
as finite resources threatened by the human being’s tendency to maximize his own benefits.
Deploying the problem as the Prisoner’s Dilemma (Ostrom 1990, 3), Hardin comes to the
conclusion that the commons will always tend to be exhausted if they are not privately managed.
In his own words: “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all”(Hardin 1968). Even though the
political scientist Elinor Ostrom has proved Hardin wrong, his ideas have fuelled the arguments
and intentions of private property advocates that have deployed Hardin’s points of view over
and over again. His basic assumptions become redundant in a context in which commons have
a generative quality, in which the use of knowledge multiplies its value, in which a given idea
breeds new ideas and in which one’s use doesn’t interfere with someone else´s use (this is quite
the contrary in P2P systems in which the larger the number of seeders, the faster one´s access to
content or information is replicated). Knowledge-based commons are not threatened by
exhaustion from over-use but the problems that arise in these new commons come from two
different sources: the menace of their enclosure following corporate interests on the one hand
and on the other, the lack of organizational or cooperation forms to preserve, store, archive and
re-deploy these commons. The ability to actualize these commons depends on the forms of
cooperation that people establish. This intersection of ideas and forms of organization is
possibly one of the spots in which these commons materialize; others can be once these become
actualized as commodities or when they are defined by legal architectures.
In the case of intangible assets, these need a legal framework to be defined as such and turn
them into someone’s possession. Lessig points out that “the law turns the intangible into
property” (2004:84), and hence it provides a context in which the intangible can be grasped, a
frame to define what can be considered as property. But legal systems are fragmented and they
are state-dependent, whilst knowledge and ideas have no problems in crossing these artificial
boundaries. It is in this context, and inspired by the ideas put forward by Arjun Appadurai
(1986), in which we must look at the biographies of cultural items, seeing how they pass from
being commodities to turn into cultural heritage or intangible commons. These ‘things’ can be
momentarily interfaced as specific objects or can be digitalized and turned into lines of code.
They materialize when a given legal framework defines its qualities and uses and immaterialize
when one remembers a given movie scene or suffers from an ear worm. These things constantly
escape the logic of scarce commodities and function on the plane of abundance; they multiply
and disperse to later recombine and form new things. These things can be remixed and
reassembled despite the legal circumstances that try to stop this from happening, they create
lines of material/ immaterial, legal/illegal dispositions. They can be extremely unstable but also
they can be stabilized if they are engraved on objects.
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All these qualities prove that this kind of property challenges the traditional understandings of
property to such an extent that they can hardly be conceptualized as such. These things can be
temporarily stabilized as property, they can be materialized using legal artifacts, but they can
easily become unstable and escape this precarious mould. As Moulier-Boutang (2004) reflects,
all the legal systems designed to protect industrial capitalism become obsolete in the age of
cognitive capitalism, the material/immaterial dichotomy doesn’t contribute to understanding the
properties of these things that tend to escape property. We must bear this in mind when we
reflect about these new commons, which can re-materialize in the forms in which they are
managed and deployed, as we will now see.
Gifts and reciprocity
As I have already established before, along with the resource and a system of rules, communities
are one of the central elements that define a commons. Many contemporary analysts have
worked on providing an understanding to dynamics and norms that shape these communities.
One aspect that these have in common is that they share many traits with those societies
articulated through gifts (Mauss, 2001; Sahlins, 1972). One of the most interesting figures
working on the concept of community is the Italian political philosopher Roberto Esposito. He
explains how the notion of “the gift” is inherent to the notion of community as “the word
munus, from which communitas is derived, means both the law and the gift, breaking from the
beginning the link that contemporary communitarism has built between community and
ownership”(Esposito, 2009:16). He keeps on exploring this notion of the munus in order to find
more clues on the elements that forge a community, and writes “munus means a task, an
obligation and a law. The other meaning of the term implies the bindings of a gift, but a gift you
must give, not receive, so again it implies a form of obligation. The members of a community
are so because they are connected through a common law” (Esposito, 2009:25). The origins of
the notion of community provide an unmistakable resemblance with the current definitions of
the commons: communities bound by a set of norms and the need to give. Communities are
connected through an absence, what we have called the resource; that is, what everybody can
use but nobody can own. The resource must be understood as an absence; nobody can own it
without risking losing the commons. There is a need to be in common, to discuss, to establish
laws, to negotiate constantly how the resource will be managed and exploited. In that sense the
common helps to produce the community, its absence as something you can own provides a
context for the communities to develop. As Esposito explains “the community doesn’t protect
the subject enclosing him or her in the limits of a collective belonging, on the contrary it pushes
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the subject to the outside, the subject is exposed to the contact and the contagion of the
other”(2009:16).
The commons need time and effort, they produce a feeling of debt in the heart of the
communities that live from these commons. People owe their time and work to the commons,
you must give to the commons. For this reason contemporary scholars working on the
commons are looking back into classical texts that address the nature and reality of gift based
economies. Lewis Hyde, who has written a book explicitly named The Gift: How the Creative Spirit
Transforms the World, uses the ideas put forward by Marcel Mauss in order to understand those
obligations subjects have towards the commons. He writes “Mauss noticed for one thing, that
gift economies tend to be marked by three related obligations: the obligation to give, the
obligation to accept, and the obligation to reciprocate. He also pointed out that we should
understand gift exchange to be a ‘total social phenomenon’ - one whose transactions are at once
economic, judicial, moral, aesthetic, religious and mythological” (Hyde, 2006:xvii). Again we see
how this munus implies to give but also to follow a set of laws. Being able to recognize how the
other follows the same protocols as yourself generates the basic bonds that links these
communities together; as opposed to market-based societies these commons based societies are
looking to maximize collective benefits. In addition “the cardinal difference between gift and
commodity exchange is that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, while the sale
of a commodity leaves no necessary connection” (Hyde, 2006:58). Roberto Esposito opposes
the notion of community (communitas) to that of immunity (inmunitas). If in the first case the
subject is bounded to a law, in the second he is released of the obligation. Immunity releases the
obligation of reciprocity. When you turn a gift into a commodity, money relieves the subject
from the bond to the other. You cancel your debt through a payment. The market cancels the
commons.
The gift cannot be measured, quantified. One knows that he or she is in debt to the rest of the
community, that is the law, but there is no explicit quantity of time, work or goods to be
returned. Contemporary commons are also based on similar systems based on gifts and
reciprocity. Lawrence Lessig has studied the importance of sharing in the creation of
contemporary digital and cultural commons. He believes we are seeing the appearance of a new
mode of economy, what he calls a sharing economy, that co-exists with the market-based
economy. As he writes “there exists not just the commercial economy, which meters access on
the simple metric of price, but also a sharing economy, where access to culture is regulated not
by price, but by a complex set of social relations” (2008:145). This sharing economy that
generates common goods is articulated through gifts, donations and the sharing of time in order
to build strong communities. These are no longer physical communities but virtual communities
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bonded through the cultural commons. Again we see the centrality of the gift in the constitution
of these new commons. Lessig writes “gifts in particular, and the sharing economy in general,
are thus devices for building connection with people, they establish relationships, and draw
upon those relationships. They are the glue of the community” (Lessig, 2008:148). These virtual
communities share a common resource, they can be constituted around software (the free
software communities for example), knowledge (wikipedians), an interest in cinema (virtual
cinema enthusiast communities that translate and subtitle movies, provide contextual
information, capture stills, etc.), or in music (DJ communities that share tracks and samples of
music), etc. Ultimately these communities also generate a set of rules and protocols to be
followed in order to keep these new commons in place and help to make them sustainable.
These digital or cultural commons are exposed to risks, the enclosures produced by intellectual
property, the capture of the resource by others or the introduction of markets and money into
these networks. So these commons also feel the tensions that traditional commons suffered.
Lessig provides an example of how these commons can provide the basis for business models
that try to capture the collective benefits. He writes “around these sharing economies,
companies like Second Life build business. They thus try to extract profits from the sharing of
others” (2008:219). The creative industries again are a clear example of business models that try
to capture the benefits generated by collective work. The proximity of the market constitutes a
threat to these communities as businesses are immune to the obligation of reciprocity.
Communities must constantly work through these tensions and find ways of keeping the
commons in common. Lessig explores another example of this tension. In this case a big
corporation, Microsoft, is willing to introduce some of these communities into its business
model. He writes “Microsoft is building a hybrid economy. Volunteers living within what was
once a pure sharing economy – Usenet - devote extraordinary time and effort to helping
Microsoft users better use Microsoft products. Microsoft is not passive about this sharing. It
cultivates it. It spends real resources to understand how to make it work better” (Lessig,
2008:202). Once these communities are captured by these corporate networks, they start
demanding to be remunerated for their work. The introduction of money into these
communities becomes a threat to their existence. These common pools of knowledge become
quantified. Gift is turned into labour. This is the reason why it is so important to establish
protocols and strong rules in order to avoid being absorbed, captured or incorporated into
market systems. Self-organization is a key element of these gift or sharing communities, they
must be able to react to the threat of immunity. Money individualizes communities. Commons
without communities cease being commons.
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Communities and Self-organization
I finally want to address a very important issue that lies at the core of the notion of the
commons: the way in which people organize to exploit, maintain and learn from the commons.
Possibly this point is even more important in knowledge-based commons because these forms
of organization and cooperation will define the bare existence of the commons. Previously I
have defined three instances in which we can trace the materialization of the commons: when
they are interfaced by legal systems, when they are actualized in certain products and finally
when these become entangled with forms of organization and cooperation. I now want to
discuss the forms of self-organization and institutionalizing processes that evolve around the
commons. David Bollier explicitly claims that “a commons does not revolve around money and
market exchange, but around collective participation and shared values. It does not use property
rights and contracts in order to generate value; it uses gift exchange and moral commitments to
build a community of trust and common purpose (…) Generically speaking, a commons is a
governance regime for managing collective resources sustainable and equitably” (Bollier,
2008:144). This is an important aspect to consider, because far from constituting those “natural”
resources waiting to be exhausted because of human intervention described by Gareth Hardin38,
the commons are political constructs shaped by forms of organization and governance.
Movements such as the ones constituted by the Free Culture advocates reliance on forms of
self-organization; they are a fruit of a loose coordination of heterogeneous subjects that share
common interests.
The commons are transversal to the market and the state. The commons constitute a
governance system that needs its own institutions which need to be monitorized on a regular
basis and be under surveillance but also need to be used, consumed and reproduced. Elinor
Ostrom has been one of the most important voices on the definition and study of the
contemporary commons. She has proved that most of the theories that prognosticated that the
commons could never survive as productive models were wrong and provided a strong
empirical knowledge of cases in which the commons have been long-lasting productive models.
She has also focused on the governance models that shape the commons and which are, in fact,
essential constitutive elements of the commons. Commenting on the polarization between the
models proposed by state and market advocates she writes “what one can observe in the world,
however, is that neither the state nor the market is uniformly successful in enabling individuals
to sustain long-term, productive use of natural resource systems”(Ostrom, 1990:1). Between
38According to Lewis Hyde, Harding posed a false problem because he was never describing a
commons in the first place. In his own words “a true commons is a stinted thing, what Harding
describes is not a commons at all but what is nowadays called an unmanaged common-pool resource”
(Hyde, 2010:35)
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these two categories the commons stand as an alternative model, but it constitutes a model in
which its governing institutions don’t come from outside, they are not imposed over the
individuals that constitute the commons but are instead generated by the commoners.
In this sense, the notion of community I am using in this context does not refer to something
given, that is, I am not talking about people who share geographic spaces or specific concerns,
but the communities discussed here, taking Esposito’s lead, are constituted by those persons
able to define specific protocols to exploit a commons or that are affected by them. Ostrom
recognizes that public policy has never fully understood the potential or organizational models
that have emerged around the commons. Self-organization has never been fully accepted by
policy makers anxious to impose governance models from above. As she argues “what is
missing from the policy analyst’s tool kit is an adequately specified theory of collective action
whereby a group of principals organize themselves voluntarily to retain the residuals of their
own efforts” (Ostrom, 1990:25). This lack of understanding of the mechanisms and
organizational models that allow human beings to self-organize has threatened the commons
that are perceived as contingent and unstable systems (whilst believing that markets or public
institutions are safe and stable models). Policy makers are sceptical of models that can function
without institutional assistance. The degree of autonomy that a commons needs in order to
develop its own governing systems is seen as a threat to top-down organization advocates who
predict that self-organization based models are highly ineffective. There is a reluctance to believe
that commoners can define sets or rules that will help to manage the commons, that shared
responsibility can constitute a basis of self-government or that non-market based organizational
models can be effective in exploiting and sustaining a collective resource.
Ostrom has researched into these questions, as she acknowledges “the central question in this
study is how a group of principals who are in an interdependent situation can organize and
govern themselves to obtain continuing joint benefits when all face temptations to free-ride,
shirk, or otherwise act opportunistically” (Ostrom, 1990:29). This point reminds us of some of
the problems diagnosed by Paolo Virno in respect of the emotional dispositions favoured by the
consolidation of cognitive capitalism. Opportunism is again one of the principal problems that
affects the consolidation of the commons. Free-riding and opportunistic behaviours are on the
complete opposite spectrum of cooperative forms of organization. Ostrom argues “as long as
the appropriators stay unorganized, they cannot achieve a joint return as high as they could have
received if they had organized in some way to undertake collective action” (Ostrom, 1990:39).
Individualism and opportunism threats not only the stability of the commons but in the long
run it constitutes a weaker model. Social cooperation requires not only of the channels in which
knowledge can be shared and distributed but also of self-regulating mechanisms to ensure this
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knowledge is not privatized, exploited on an individual basis or claimed individually. Medieval
perambulations and councils need to be upgraded and actualized in order to fit into the
requirements of our age.
The fact is that depending and sharing from a commons can constitute an empowering situation
but also it relies on a fragile ecosystem, as “when multiple appropiators39 are dependent on a
given CPR as a source of economic activity, they are jointly affected by almost everything they
do” (Ostrom, 1990:38). Commons generate close communities whose actions can have
consequences on each of the elements that constitute the community; commons are ecosystemic
by nature. These communities are constituted by the commons but at the same time they are
who constitute the commons. These communities shape and define the commons, regulate it,
benefit from it but also suffer some of its consequences. These communities do not search for
optimum results but struggle to define sustainable self-organizational models to manage the
commons. They face organizational problems on a regular basis, they develop new tools and
rules to regulate the commons and they design commons-based institutions. The need to keep
the commons away from the market forces and out of reach from state based policies, they seek
autonomy through the creation of strong governmental models.
Ostrom acknowledges that “in all instances the individuals involved have had considerable
autonomy to craft their own institutions” (1990:60), but they still need to defend these
institutions from external and internal menaces. These unstable institutions give rise to
infrastructures. These elements will help to distribute, share and actualize the value accumulated
in the commons, but on the opposite side of public infrastructures, there are unstable
infrastructures which are always contingent and ephemeral. I will examine and work through
these structures looking closely into some examples and case studies in chapter six of this work.
“In these models, participants adopt resolute strategies to cooperate so long as everyone else
cooperates. If anyone levitates, the models posit that all others will deviate immediately and
forever” (1990:93). This is paradoxically the strong and weak point of these new structures.
Highly resilient, these models are based on fragile elements, such as trust or merits. They
depend on the ability to design rules and institutions to regulate collective action.
One of the movements that has emerged recently around the premises of defending the public
domain and the need for a strong commons-based production is the consequence of the legal
battles over copyright that have taken place in the U.S for the last twenty years. Promoted by
Lawrence Lessig and under the name of Creative Commons, a new set of legal contracts have
39Ostrom names appropiators to all the elements who have the right to extract elements from a
commons or as she defines, from a common-pool resource or CPR.
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been crafted in order to allow authors to select what rights they want to preserve and what
rights are granted to users. Creative Commons found inspiration in the Free Software
movement but provides a much more pragmatic approach: each producer can select a license to
attach to their work which displays different grades of permission. Some are quite restrictive
licenses whilst others ensure the same freedoms that Free Software’ GPL does. This fact has
been subjected to much critique, specially by the hardcore activist sectors which perceive the
Creative Commons as a weak liberal tool. The notion of the commons that underlines this
movement is strictly based on legal principals, not so much on the constitution of communities.
In this sense authors such David Berry and Giles Moss have formulated an interesting critique,
as they argue that “the Creative Commons licenses create commons without commonality”
(Berry & Moss 2007). Another critique is based on the notion of freedom that authors such as
Lessig, Benkler or Bollier deploy in their works. Olga Goriunova (2008) or Tiziana Terranova
(2009) have manifested the liberal and market-driven orientations of much of these projects.
Another critique highlights that the Creative Commons just constitute an extension of
copyright, promoting the idea of authorship or taking intellectual property for granted. From all
this we can deduce that the creation of a contemporary knowledge based commons is a complex
and problematic enterprise, that needs to be considered from many angles, taking numerous
aspects into account.
The Commons as Virtual
I have argued that the creative industries were born to feed on these knowledge commons, their
aim is to tap into the creative basins in order to extract ideas and inventions. But instead of
generating commons-based models, the creative industries have been designed as a set of
individualized businesses that operate independently. In this sense I will try to describe the
creative industries as a set of enterprises that generate added value by extracting and
commodifiyng ideas, sounds, colors, shapes or inventions from the commons40. In a sense we
can think of the commons as the creative industries’ virtual (Deleuze 1988), a virtual that gets
actualized each time one of these small companies puts a name and a brand on a given idea. The
knowledge commons function as a memory, as a repository of all the inventions, compositions,
grammars, ideas, designs or discoveries that have been realized by mankind. On the opposite
side the creative industries just proceed as momentary actualizers of the wealth held in these
40By no means this subtraction from the commons as a business model is a new idea, according to
Lewis Hyde we can look at John Lock’s notion of property to see a regime of continuous extraction of
elements from the commons. He writes “John Lock, in developing his theory of private property,
famously claimed that things lying in the aboriginal commons become our property when we mix our
labour with them, notwithstanding that they were once ‘common to all’. Our labour removes things
from ‘the common state’ and in so doing it ‘it excludes the common right to other men’” (Hyde,
2010:38)
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commons, the creative industries tap into these commons and condense the histories of music,
literature and poetry into a cheesy love song which they will try to sell for 99 cents. These
industries will claim ownership on the commodities they produce; they will enforce legal
mechanisms in order to keep their productions away from the commons, although we have seen
that these measures are always contingent and extremely vulnerable. Much of these items will
become part of the social imaginary and will eventually percolate into the commons where they
will wait to be recombined and reassembled into another cultural item, sometime in the future.
In the following chapter I am going to analyze the normative figure of the creative worker,
which displays important traits of individualization and opportunism, seeking individual gains
and pleasure in his or her work: the cultural entrepreneur. These models are completely opposed
to the dynamics and needs of the cultural commons from which they breed, creating important
problems and contradictions, as we will see in the following pages.
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Chapter four.
The Individualization of Work I: The
Rise of Cultural Entrepreneurship
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I´m on a highway to hell
ACDC
The traits that define entrepreneurs are suspiciously
similar to the ones that characterize fraudsters: they take
pleasure in risk, are quick at reading situations, they are
ambitious and seductive, they love money, they become
affective hypocrites and display great deals of
emotional intelligence.
César Rendueles “Egolatría”
Analogous to the expansion of the creative industries as an economic growth model, we see the
promotion of new role models and forms of work aimed at transforming artists, designers,
musicians and cultural producers into economic agents. Throughout this chapter I intend to
analyse the new forms of governmentality and subjectivity that go along with the promotion and
expansion of the concept of cultural entrepreneurship. To do so I will draw an archaeological
account and look into the different agencies, funding bodies, discourses and policies set up to
promote cultural entrepreneurship, as well as analysing the main business models devised for the
sector.
With this work, I intend to make visible a conflict that is currently affecting the field, in which
self-organized forms of work, informal networks and individual artists have been prompted to
transform into small enterprises following certain schemes and models that have little or
nothing to do with the ways in which cultural production usually operates. As we have seen in
the previous chapter the creative industries are defined by “individual creativity” and “which
have a potential for job and wealth creation through the generation and exploitation of
intellectual property”. I have already explored some of the consequences of imposing
intellectual property as the principal mode of extracting benefits from culture; in this chapter I
want to work on the consequences of this individualization of creativity and the figure proposed
to accomplish such a task: the cultural entrepreneur. This individualization will constitute a
challenge to the creative communities that as we have explored in the previous chapter, are
central to the cultural commons.
These hegemonic discourses have found a fertile ground in the pervasive precarity that defines
this sector and that has pushed cultural producers into exploring new ways of working following
alien work structures and operating systems. Creative workers are confronted by an
overpowering public discourse in which they are pictured as “cultural entrepreneurs”, the “new
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independents”, “culturepreneurs” or a number of policy driven definitions. In some cases some
workers will go along with these definitions and will fit in neatly; in other cases these categories
will be negotiated and disputed. Along the following lines I will introduce these contradictions,
aided by fragments of interviews conducted to a number of Spanish cultural workers who have
undergone training or taken part in schemes aimed at promoting cultural entrepreneurship.
In order to explain this whole process I am going to trace the origin of the discourses on which
the notion of entrepreneurship is based, focusing on the work done during the nineties by
scholars such as Paul Du Gay, who provides an understanding to the ways in which public
bureaucracy started being privatized in the United Kingdom under the New Labour
government, leading to what he brands as “new public management or new corporate
management” (Du Gay, 1996: 264). After this, I will try to trace back the way in which the
Schumpeterian notion of entrepreneurship started being used in relation to the creative sector as
a way to define the work to be done by cultural producers. In that sense I will examine some of
the ideas put forward by thinkers related to New Labour such as Geoff Mulgan or Charles
Leadbeater. Working for the think-tank DEMOS, these two lobbyists have a central role in the
introduction of this figure into policy. This discourse that took place in the UK during the late
nineties was later introduced into the continent through policy briefings, lectures and political
conferences. As we will see, the promotion of entrepreneurship relies on a vast number of
institutions, policies, schemes, strategic plans, conferences, booklets, papers, meetings and legal
frameworks. The combination of these elements is responsible for the production of different
sets of policy that have been implemented many other countries.
I will finish claiming that this construction of working subjectivities through cultural policy is a
just part of a social process in which semiotics, desires, norms and funding schemes have
collided, giving rise to these new economic agents. In this sense I will try to argue that cultural
entrepreneurship, understood as construction and a subjective dimension, is strongly tied to a
neoliberal economic discourse. It provides a government model that suits perfectly the
discursive framework provided by neoliberal theorists. The cultural entrepreneur is the virtuoso
of a neoliberal economy. By exploring this reality I will try to see how some of the personal
conflicts cultural producers are currently facing can be located and be caused by bigger
contradictions or conflicts which emerge in the capitalist mode of production.
I am interested in understanding the processes that lead cultural agents to think themselves as if
they were self-enterprises. How this implies the need to privatize oneself; turn your personal
experiences into a set of assets and finally, exploit the collective commons and privatize them.
This model not only provides a route to follow for artists, designers, developers or film-makers
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but also produces individualized subjectivities and justifies the enclosure of the commons. To
understand this notion in a bigger framework I will start by discussing the relations between the
notion of self-enterprise and neoliberal discourses following Michel Foucault’s ideas put forward
during his lectures at the Collège de France.
Self-enterprises and Neoliberalism
The idea of society as an entity composed of a myriad of enterprises and self-enterprises that
interact together following market laws is one of the greatest achievements of neoliberal
imaginary. The construction of this notion has a long history, and during the lectures that the
French philosopher Michel Foucault gave on the Birth of Biopolitics, at the Collège de France,
he engaged in the history of liberalism, trying to identify the main discourses and events that
gave birth to the neoliberal forms of governmentality as we know them. In this work Foucault
does not attempt to engage with neoliberalism as a coherent form of ideology (his genealogy
includes reflections on the German ordo-liberal model, the French tradition and laissez-faire or
the north American liberalism), but introduces neoliberalism as an articulation of different
modes of governance, that give place to a specific mode of governmentality. If authors such as
David Harvey have developed more historical accounts of how neoliberalism has grown and
been introduced as an ideological artefact (see Harvey 2007), instead the French philosopher
shows us the forms of veridiction and apparatus of power that underlie neoliberalism.
In Foucualt’s work he dates the origins of liberalism “in the middle of the eighteenth century”
when “we are forced to note an important transformation that in a general way will be a
characteristic feature of what could be called modern governmental reason”(Foucault, 2008:10).
It is in this historical moment where Foucault locates the birth of political economy as an
intellectual instrument and a form to measure rationally good or bad decisions. Political
economy becomes a limitation to governmental reason. This discipline first emerged and is
closely linked to the liberal ideas of thinkers such as Adam Smith or David Ricardo and in
Foucault’s view, it is in this conjuncture of a given ideology (liberalism) and a system for the
production of truths (political economy) were a completely new form of government emerges.
This new model replaces the raison d'État and introduces a new way of ruling: government
through economics. Under this new regime the good government is that which enhances the
economy and allows it to function smoothly. The government's function changes from being
the entity that looks after the state to defend the interests of the market. This way “the economy
produces legitimacy for the state that is its guarantor. In other words, the economy creates
public law, and this is an absolutely important phenomenon, which is not entirely unique in
history to be sure, but is nonetheless a quite singular phenomenon of our times (Foucault,
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2008:84). Liberal ideology that follows the ideals of the laissez-faire defines the market as the
central axis of the state and the economy, and says that the state should retreat to allow the
market to regulate commercial flows and economic exchanges which will later turn into wealth
that will eventually spread all across the society. Under these views markets don't need external
regulation as they follow simple internal laws such as competition, offer and demand. Under this
creed the role for the state is to create institutions able to guarantee the conditions for perfect
competition, and by so doing so they will ensure monopolies are not constituted and other
obstacles to free competition will disappear. This constitutes a radical change for the role of the
state, “the market, or pure competition, which is the essence of the market, can only appear if it
is produced, and if it is produced by an active govermentality” (Foucault, 2008:121); this is the
new mission for the state.
This important change in the conception of the nature of the state also has profound
implications on the ways in which the state will relate and govern its citizens. The political
subject has been progressively replaced by a citizen that shares all the traits of the homo
economicus, that is, a free individual that seeks to maximize profits and operates following the
rules of the free market. Foucault is very explicit on this point as he writes that with these
changes “what is sought is not a society subject to the commodity-effect, but a society subject to
the dynamic of competition. Not a supermarket society, but an enterprise society. The homo
economicus sought after is not the man of exchange or man the consumer; he is the man of
enterprise and production” (Foucault, 2008:147). In this sense neoliberalism stops functioning
as an ideological framework and operates as a mode of governmentality. This homo economicus is
an apparatus of power and the self-enterprise acts as an enterprise following market dynamics,
seeking in every moment to transform his assets (social capital, knowledge, skills) into wealth.
As the French philosopher points out, under this new regime government “is not a matter of
constructing a social fabric in which the individual would be in direct contact with nature, but of
constructing a social fabric in which precisely the basic units would have the form of the
enterprise”(Foucault, 2008:148). This society composed by self-enterprises that interact with
each other following market rules and willing to maximize their profits responds to a neoliberal
model of government. Foucault makes this point very clear as he writes that “this multiplication
of the enterprise form within the social body is what is at stake in neoliberal policy. It is a matter
of making the market, competition and so the enterprise, into what could be called the
formative power of society” (Foucault, 2008:148). This idea of the social body as an entity
comprised by enterprises can be understood as a productive regime but also needs to be
addressed as a system of government based on very precise subjective dispositions. The
enterprise is not just an institution but a way of behaving in the economic field. Competition,
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objectives, tactics, and the freedom to interact with markets seem to be the new traits that
define the entrepreneurial subjectivity.
Under a neoliberal ideology the state has a very limited role to play as it leaves social and cultural
issues in the hands of the “free market”, law is the framework in which enterprises operate and
it must ensure nobody abandons the game. Institutions should not interfere directly with the
market but instead they must prepare subjects to enter the free market, teaching them and
offering the skills to become self-enterprises. Government is replaced by governance, the state
no longer offers a security network. Citizens must rely on themselves and their abilities, skills
and knowledge to succeed in a society dominated by economic competition. In this context the
entrepreneur will emerge as a key figure, as Foucault writes, “homo economicus is an
entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself. This is true to the extent that, in practice, the stake in
all neoliberal analyses is the replacement every time of homo economicus as partner of exchange
with a homo economicus as entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for
himself his own producer, being for himself the source of his earnings” (Foucault, 2008:226).
Now you are your main investor, main asset but also main exploiter. You enjoy success but also
you become the only bearer of the uncertainty you must assume; apparently your destiny is only
in your hands. It is at this point that Gary Becker’s (1964) notion of human capital makes sense,
as the entrepreneur lives through mobilizing and relying on his or her own assets.
One of the main points Foucault makes is that entrepreneurship constitutes a type of
governmentality developed by neoliberal discourses. To do so a set of regulations, policies,
agencies and schemes have been designed to promote the rise of entrepreneurship in the
cultural sector: there has been a coordinated attempt to build entrepreneurialism in culture.
Having arrived at this point we need to look into the Austrian economist Joseph A. Shumpeter's
ideas on entrepreneurship, as they will constitute one of the key elements in the development of
this new notion of worker.
Schumpeter's notion of entrepreneurship
One of the clearest depictions of this new figure appears in the pages of two of Schumpeter's
most well known works “The Theory of Economic Development” (Schumpeter, 1974) and
“Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy” (Schumpeter, 1983 (1950)). Schumpeter’s capitalist
growth model is based on two core factors, innovation and competition, from which creative
destruction (Schumpeter, 1983: 82-85) will develop as a consequence. His notion of capitalism
as an ever changing system in need of inventions, innovation or technical advances in order to
grow and change, and by doing so destroying previous structures or monopolistic economic
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structures, had a profound impact on economic and industrial thinkers throughout the twentieth
century. As he argues “the opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the
organizational development from the craft shop and factory illustrate the same process of
industrial mutation - if I may use that biological term - that incessantly revolutionizes the
economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new
one. This process of creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism” (Schumpeter,1983:
82). This process, which he pictures as one of the necessary conditions of capitalist evolution, is
an inevitable consequence of market competition. For Schumpeter this key concept must be
updated in order to properly understand the way a modern capitalist system works. He envisages
a clear change from previous stages of competition inside capitalist;, innovation becomes a key
player, and as he argues “in a capitalist reality as distinguished from its textbook picture, it is not
that kind of competition which counts but the competition from the new commodity, the new
technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization (…) - competition which
commands a decisive cost or quality advantage and which strikes not at the margins of the
profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives”(1983:
84). It is in this framework in which we see the emergence of the entrepreneur with a firmly
established role; he is the agent that must promote competitive advantage, push innovations into
the market and make sure that competition is driven to its limits in order to open up as many
new markets as possible. In one of the clearest depictions of what entrepreneurship constitutes
he writes: “the function of the entrepreneur is to reform or to revolutionize the production
system, exploiting an invention, or a technical possibility not yet put into test in order to
produce a new commodity or an old one with new production means. To open a new source of
raw materials or a new output for a commodity, to reorganize industry, etc.” (Schumpeter, 1983:
181). He makes a clear distinction between those who invent things and those who promote
innovation, as we see when he argues that “as long as they are not carried into practice,
inventions are economically irrelevant. And to carry any improvement into effect is a task
entirely different from the inventing of it, and a task, moreover, requiring entirely different kinds
of aptitudes” (Schumpeter, 1974: 88). The entrepreneur does not need to be inventive, not even
creative, but must be able to identify inventions that can be introduced into the market, must be
able to locate new niches, must be able to compete to position a new product or technique and
enjoy the benefits derived from obtaining of competitive advantage.
The entrepreneur becomes an active actor of change and growth, opening markets and setting
the paths for the rest of businesses to follow. In this sense it is not merely an economic figure
but a social one. We see this when the author states that the entrepreneur “has triumphed also
for others, blazed the trail and created a model for them to copy. They can and will follow them,
first individuals and the whole crowds” (Schumpeter,1974:133). He acknowledges this is a
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difficult mission, stating that “to take innovations into practice is not an easy task and it
constitutes a peculiar economic function in itself. This happens because it is far away from the
day-to-day tasks people easily understand, and in second place, because the outside world will
resist these modifications” (Schumpeter, 1983: 181). He will draw a narrative of the
entrepreneur as an anti-hero, describing the figure as a discrete person far away from other
economic leaders. In this sense he addresses some of the subjective elements that shape this
economic actor, introducing a key factor that will be crucial in order to understand its later
deployment as a role figure in neoliberal policy personal government. Schumpeter will argue that
“in the case of the capitalist entrepreneur, his role is less salient than that of the medieval land
owners, and it constitutes a way of personal government, which rests upon facts such as
personal energy or personal notions of success” (1983:183). Other key components of his
character are “initiative, authority or foresight” (1974:75). Self government, self control,
personal notions of success and achievement will be later mobilized by policy makers to address
and describe workers, and in fact, I believe constitute decisive elements in the configuration of
some forms of governance that I will explore later on.
Although it becomes apparent that the entrepreneur will have to take on an important amount
of risk, Schumpeter openly states the opposite; we see this when he argues that “the
entrepreneur is never a risk bearer, (…) the one who gives credit comes to grief if the
undertaking fails” (Schumpeter, 1974:137). This is because this author makes a clear distinction
between the figure of the entrepreneur and that of the capitalist. He stretches his argument
further, stating that “even though if the entrepreneur finances himself out of former profits or if
he contributes the means of production belonging to his static business, the risk falls on him as
a capitalist, not as an entrepreneur” (Schumpeter, 1974:137). In order to understand this
argument we must look into the ideas put forward by the Chicago School economist Frank
Knight and his distinction between risk and uncertainty (1921). Entrepreneurship can not be
insured, so it becomes a matter of uncertainty (probabilities) rather than a matter or risk
(quantifiable). Schumpeter’s ideas must be revised in this sense as nowadays, the line in between
capitalist, investor, promoter, entrepreneur, businessman etc. is quite porous, and it would be
difficult to agree up to which point one economic actor is one thing or the other, so on a
functional level we should take into account that there is a big amount of risk and uncertainty
involved in entrepreneurship. We will get back to this point in the following chapter when we
address the notion of precarity and the uncertainty attached to creative work.
Schumpeter sees the emergence of the entrepreneur as a culmination of a natural process of the
“cultural aspects of a capitalist economy” (Schumpeter, 1983: 168), which are based on
rationalism and logic. He likes to believe that “economical models are the matrix of logic itself”
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(1983: 170). We can clearly see how Foucault’s ideas on the governmental role that political
economy has resonate with these ideas. Schumpeter will go as far as to claim that “the rationalist
spirit is itself a production of the growth of capitalism” (1983: 172), which has “not only
produced modern science’s mental modes, but also has created mankind and its means of
subsistence” (1983:172). That is why he can claim that “by creating the social space for a new
class based on its individual accomplishments in the economic field, capitalism attracted the
strongest wills and most powerful intelligences to itself” (1983:172). Only on this basis can we
see the emergence of the entrepreneur as process of “natural evolution”, as a consequence of
capitalism itself, and as the culmination of the figure of the “homo economicus” focused on
maximising profits and basing his existence on rational calculation. Schumpeter is not alone in
seeing in the figure of the entrepreneur the conclusion of a natural evolution cycle, and we will
later go on to see some contemporary examples of these kind of thinking, focusing on people
such as Peter Druker or more recently Richard Barbrook. I believe that we need to be extremely
suspicious about the concept of “homo economius”, and now, after reading the work developed
by a number of feminist scholars (Ferber & Nelson, 1993, Carrasco, 1999) we cannot stop
seeing the political connotations attached to such a notion and the economic model it helps to
promote.
Somehow Schumpeter’s description of an entrepreneur is more a way of being than a closed set
of activities. This social dimension is interesting because we could argue that what he is willing
to do is to create a category with which to erase the concept of class. We can interpret this from
his words when he states that “because being an entrepreneur is not a profession and as a rule
not a lasting condition, entrepreneurs do not form a social class in the technical sense (…) it can
also put its stamp on an epoch of social history, can form a style of life, or systems of moral and
aesthetic values, but in itself it signifies a class position no more than it presupposes one”
(Schumpeter, 1974: 78). I do believe that this is an important point to bear in mind, as in a way
what the economist is doing is creating a subjective position that can help to overwrite a feeling
of class. This disposition has more to do with being economically engaged, with accepting the
market as it is and pushing it further. This implies creating a whole subjective dimension
attached to the entrepreneur.
Summarizing we see that Schumpeter has perfectly defined the evolution, role and need for
entrepreneurs in his economic model, and we have also seen how this figure is a clear mediator,
dealing with notions of innovation and competition, which drive liberal and later, neoliberal
economics. If in his views the state needs to be redefined in order to let the entrepreneurs lead
the economy, one could think that the state has no need to create or promote entrepreneurial
values, these must emerge “naturally” in this perfect competition arena. But as we will see,
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things do not happen this way, as by no means do things occur “naturally” inside the economic
sphere. Currently the state, corporations, and a number of combined and different interests have
a major role to play in the promotion and production of entrepreneurial subjectivities. Along
this chapter I will analyze different policies and discourses that are pushing cultural producers to
become more entrepreneurial, seeing how the different discourses that sustain the creative
industries have naturalized this need to display an entrepreneurial attitude. These policies and
schemes have aimed at the destruction of a certain sense of community that used to define
creative practices. The figure of the entrepreneur singularizes and individualizes a collective
endeavour and by introducing the need for maximizing profits it has functioned as a disruptive
element, breaking feelings of being part of a bigger collective. Competition among creative
workers has caused severe strains in the dynamics that define cultural work and its communities;
we will see this through the interviews that I have conducted with a number of cultural
entrepreneurs.
The growth of entrepreneurship
I will now try to describe how the need for entrepreneurship has shifted from being an
imperative in the business sphere, to be promoted as a desirable attitude for workers in the
public sector to later hit the creative industries. This transition has been partly described by a
number of authors such as Paul Du Gay, Anthony Davies and Simon Ford or Charles
Leadbeater. According to the sociologist Paul Du Gay, discourses on entrepreneurship started
affecting the public sphere following a “radical institutional renewal regime” started by the
Conservative party in the United Kingdom during the 1980s (Du Gay, 1996: 251). The
introduction of neoliberalism came hand-in-hand with the promotion of the entrepreneur as its
leading figure. These changes affected primarily the public sector which, on one hand was being
completely privatized, while simultaneously was being challenged in productivity terms, pushing
it into “renewal”. A growing number of right-wing thinkers were criticising the way public
administration and bureaucracy was being conducted, demanding for a much more “efficient
management”. For these critics “the main problem rested on the need to change the ‘norms,
attitudes and values’ in such a way that people started to feel they could contribute in an active
way in the organism to which they belonged” (Du Gay, 1996: 252). These old “attitudes and
values” which characterise the public sector were envisaged as non-productive, ineffective and
inappropriate to run this growing sector, challenged by social changes and expectations. The
creation of an “adequate culture as a means to produce a particular relationship between the
being and the rest of the company’s members, suggests its deployment as a government
technique, intimately related to notions of identity” (Du Gay, 1996: 252). Government is
exercised as the production of specific subjectivities.
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The author continues stating that “these new organizational forms aim to make “business men”
and “entrepreneurs” out of all the workers” (1996: 252), pointing out that “the public discourse
focuses on how important it is for the subjects to acquire and display more “proactive” and
“entrepreneurial” attitudes and values” (1996: 254). Policy will be directly aimed at creating and
promoting these new values for the workforce, pushing workers to become and consider
themselves “self enterprises”. Here the notion of enterprise is “deployed evoking the need of
taking initiatives, the acceptance of risk, the need for self confidence and accountability of one’s
own actions” (1996: 257). In a way, we see how the government has itself adopted an active role
in pursuing what Schumpeter believed was a “natural consequence” of capitalism, the
production of “homo economicus” as a driving force for the growth and development of
capitalism.
Yann Moulier-Boutang helps us to define the link between a more traditional or Schumpeterian
notion of entrepreneurship and the modes of entrepreneurship that have come into being with
the advent of cognitive capitalism in which the figure of the cultural entrepreneur has a major
role to play. He argues that this figure has become central to knowledge-based forms of
production as “the entrepreneur is the first to accumulate intellectual capital in an idiosyncratic
way”(Moulier-Boutang, 2007:10). Following the chain of advents described by Paul du Gay, the
French author helps us to understand a series of important factors that have help to normalize
this economic figure as “with the increasing role of external effects, the end of hegemony of the
great corporation, the idea and the practice of entrepreneurship regains more legitimacy,
speaking of entrepreneurship inside the public central or local administration, does not seem
odd any more”(Moulier-Boutang, 2007:20). But Moulier-Boutang believes there are important
differences between the Schumpeterian entrepreneur and this new incarnation as profit making
seems to stop being the central factor motivation for entrepreneurship as now creativity and
innovation have a much more significant role to play, a point I will argue thoroughly in the next
chapter. The importance of knowledge and this will for creativity help to shape a new kind of
entrepreneurship in which artists and cultural producers seem to fit in nicely, as Moulier-
Boutang clearly puts it: “in an information society, networks, reputation and fame very often
determine the possibility itself or raising funds and undertaking activities in the market or in
society. This model is long run oriented and resembles the artists and writers achievements.
Success can be immediate, but, most of the time, a very ‘long tail’ process is required”( Moulier-
Boutang, 2007:21).
This new figure functions more as a knowledge broker, an agent able to tap into and source
from heterogeneous networks and reassemble lines of knowledge. In a very evocative sentence
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the French author defines entrepreneurship as “the apiculture of positive externalities”. As we
have determined in the first chapter, in cognitive capitalism the entrepreneur will consider
human activity valuable “in the extent to which it produces pollination of society and increases
opportunities for marketable activities to appear or will increases the value of the global
outcome of society” (Moulier-Boutang, 2007:22). This way we see how the figure of the
entrepreneur shifts and mutates to adapt and include many aspects prevalent in the field of
cultural production. In the following section I will discuss through an articulation of policies,
agencies and schemes how entrepreneurship has been promoted as a new paradigm to follow by
cultural producers.
Cultural Entrepreneurship
The hegemonic discourse on entrepreneurship soon became omnipresent and many agencies
and schemes were put in place in order to ensure no economic area escaped its impact. The
cultural field did not constitute an exception to this logic. The first policy briefing document
focused on the importance of cultural entrepreneurship in the cultural field was produced by
Charles Leadbeater and Kate Oakley and went under the name of “The Independents: Britain’s
new cultural Entrepreneurs”. In this booklet produced by DEMOS, these authors use the term
“independents” to name a large number of cultural workers that have challenged traditional
ways of producing culture and which they claim now constitute “a large and growing share of
employment in the cultural industries” which “is accounted for by the self-employed, freelancers
and micro- businesses” (Leadbeater & Oakley, 1999:11). In their account, these “cultural
entrepreneurs emerged in the 1990s, in multimedia, design, computer games, internet services,
fashion and music” and “are less dependent than their 1980s counterparts” (1999:20).
Without explicitly acknowledging it they relate the appearance of these “new independents”
with the arrival of neoliberalism to the UK and with the cuts in funding and public services the
Tory government implemented when led by Margaret Thatcher. They describe this process in
the following manner:
“the Independents came into the workforce in the late 1980s and 1990s as public
subsidies to the arts were under pressure and many large commercial
organisations were in the midst of downsizing. Careers in large organisations
became more risky and uncertain: self-employment and entrepreneurship became
a more realistic option” (Leadbeater & Oakley, 1999:15).
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Leadbeater and Oakley do not doubt to highlight the importance that this emergent sector has
for the economy; their arguments echo the ideas put forward by Chris Smith which we have
already discussed and sound similar to those put forward by Schumpeter regarding the role of
the entrepreneurs: “the new Independents matter not just because they will be a source of jobs
and growth in the future but also because they provide one model of how work and production
is likely to change in the future in other sectors” (Leadbeater & Oakley, 1999: 13). In that sense
we see again how expectations are put on this new segment of the economy in order to open up
new markets, niches, and creating a bigger economic playfield. Having said this, the authors feel
the need to acknowledge one of the least desirable aspects of cultural entrepreneurship and the
creative industries, as they admit “there is nothing soft about life in these industries. These
sectors are often chronically unstable and unpredictable” (Leadbeater & Oakley, 1999: 26). So
even though these agents constitute the economy’s cutting edge, it seems that this emerging
sector is pretty unstable itself and they continue arguing that “the career of many cultural
entrepreneurs is punctuated by success and failure, with periods of business expansions
sometimes followed by a return to self-employment (Leadbeater & Oakley, 1999: 26). Precarity,
which I will explore in more detail in the following chapter, is one of the key aspects of cultural
work, and it is difficult to define cultural entrepreneurship without acknowledging how
prevalent precarity it can be. When facing this scenario, entrepreneurs, who have been described
as economic visionaries, pioneers and risk–takers, must make a rational decision about if this
market is too unfit to work in or if it is worth taking the risk. The state has two options: on the
one hand secure the market through the creation of structural elements that can provide a safe
place from where to invest, or work on the extra-economic conditions (subjective devices) that
will ensure that these workers will remain active no matter how improbable it is that they can
really find sustainability in such an unstable market segment. That is, there is a need to deploy
forms of governance that will ensure that the productive chain does not stop working due to
market unpredictability.
Having arrived at this point, I would like to make evident one of the first contradictions or
inconsistencies in the whole entrepreneurial argument. If we have to believe that entrepreneurs
are a natural consequence of capitalist development, if it is true that there exists a historical
teleology that has made entrepreneurs emerge as the flagships of the new economy, why do
these figures (or subjective ways of identification) need to be promoted by the government
through specific policies targeting creative or cultural agents? Doesn’t a neoliberal market
economy imply that the need for certain types of workers will be market and not state
determined? Obviously we need to introduce here what later Jessop names the “external market
conditions”(Jessop, 2002) in order to guarantee a degree of stability in a market system that is
far from perfect. But we must be aware of this apparent paradox, that the state must forge
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“entrepreneurial subjects” in order to fulfil what other ways is presented as a natural
consequence of the evolution of capitalism. This is why the end of Leadbeater and Oakley’s
paper consists of a series of recommendations aimed at generating specific policies aimed at
these “new independents” making sure that they remain “independent, proactive and with an
entrepreneurial attitude”. In this sense they will state that “the main aim of policy should be to
create a conducive environment of education, business finance and open markets, which will
give this sea of small producers a better chance of surviving and growing” (Leadbeater &
Oakley, 1999: 41). In a way, this implies creating artificially the natural conditions for their
growth, because given the market reality, these small companies or entrepreneurs will hardly be
able to survive. This is why the authors of this research argue that “universities are incubators
for cultural entrepreneurs. Expanding the reach of university education from the current 35 per
cent of the eighteen year olds to more than 50 per cent will be vital to expand opportunity”
(1999: 42). In a way what these authors are recommending is that entrepreneurs should
experiment in a protected environment funded by public resources. Again, entrepreneurship is
devised as a way in which to extract benefits from commons resources. Similar to what I
discussed in chapter two, with the growth of the New Economy in the United States, cultural
entrepreneurship grows from privatizing common knowledge. In order to gain competitive
advantage cultural enterprises must tap into public resources or fund pockets of common
knowledge to be exploited; that is the entrepreneur’s initial capital. Universities will lose their
traditional function and will become tax payer funded business incubators. Apparently this
notion conflicts again with neoliberal market assumptions and the notion of the state as a
distant organism without clear functions.
The set of factors that I have been pointing out, which at first glance seem to contradict the
same ideology that has promoted them can only be explained if we de-naturalise their need and
we start looking at the whole entrepreneurial discourse from a completely different angle. We
can trace a whole set of organisations, institutions, policies and projects aimed at encouraging
entrepreneurship. These differ from city to city and from country to country. In the UK the
most salient are NESTA which Chris Smith describes in his book and which was primarily
conceived to 'help talented individuals develop their full potential'; secondly 'to turn creativity
into products and services which we can exploit in the global market; and thirdly to convince
the public and business of this agenda' (Smith, 1998:30). The Club at the ICA was another
initiative aimed at promoting entrepreneurship in the creative industries and provide a place for
networking, as Davies and Ford write “The Club was set up by the ICA in conjunction with
Goldsmiths College, NESTA, Channel 4, the Arts Council and Cap Gemini. It is a networking
club for cultural entrepreneurs and, initially at least, educationalists, arts administrators,
television executives and business consultants. It's an invite-only monthly event that provides ‘a
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networking base for its members’ and promises to introduce them to agencies, from television
companies to venture capitalists and private organisations, who may wish to support and
commission them. (The Club, email to members, July 2000)” (Davies & Ford, 2001).
The GLA through its plan 'Creative London' also promoted several schemes to develop
entrepreneurship among young and creative subjects. The number of these schemes or entities
kept growing and they have been implemented on a local, regional and national level in different
EU countries along the last two decades. I mention just a few of them as they all share similar
traits and are based on similar ideas. Unfortunately many of these schemes have ceased to exist
and one can only trace their existence through broken links on the internet, PDFs downloaded
at the time or through interviewing some of the entrepreneurs who actually attended these
courses, took part in these schemes or had some kind of experience with these entities. The
archaeology of cultural entrepreneurship helps us to confront the wreckages and ruins of all
these entities and programmes that have been eventually let down by governments and
governing bodies. The only space in which these schemes pervade is in all those cultural workers
who once transited through them, left with illusions, ideas, debts and contradictions. In this final
section of this chapter my aim is to introduce some of these contradictions as I present some of
the interviews I have conducted with some of the cultural agents who have been involved in
these programmes.
Contradictions
During the last few years I have interviewed numerous Spanish cultural workers and
representatives of small cultural enterprises that have undergone training or taken part in official
promotion schemes. In many cases this process constituted an ambivalent experience which has
left them full of contradictions, doubts or questions that we discussed and which I will explore
in the following pages. What becomes clear from the interviews I conducted is that from about
the 60 enterprises I met, almost none of them felt they were born with an entrepreneurial spirit
and on very few accounts they actually envisaged themselves as such, even though in most cases
they have accepted to be portrayed as entrepreneurs by the agencies or schemes in which they
took part. Somehow the gap between representation and self-representation can be very big.
This made me ask myself why these workers had taken part in the programmes in the first
case,;in most cases the answer I got had to do with being willing to take a step to escape from
precarity, in others the economic incentives seemed to condition this decision. Tired of working
under precarious conditions, in discontinuous employment and suffering from extreme
flexibility, some of these workers have considered entrepreneurship as an option to make their
work sustainable and as a way to find personal equilibrium. The interviews that I conducted,
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which I will introduce by fragments, took place between November 2007 and June 2008 when
the current economic crisis had already started but still hadn’t had an impact on the field I was
analyzing. Possibly some of the opinions expressed back then now, after the downturn, would
have become more radicalized. The companies I chose to interview shared in common that
they’ve taken part in official promotional schemes and were presented as cultural entrepreneurs
in websites, booklets or television advertisements run by these agencies.
I travelled across several regions of Spain, starting in Catalonia, to later go on to Madrid, the
Basque Country, Extremadura, Andalusia and Valencia. The biggest company I interviewed,
Socialware, had almost fifty workers and the smallest had two workers, so I tried to capture a
big scope of different sized companies, but in most cases the average company had from three
to five workers. During my fieldwork I also interviewed a great number of public organizations
and people in charge of promotion schemes. In Andalusia I spoke with Javier Palacios, general
manager of the Culture Council in the Andalusia Government, Flora Pedraza Rodriguez from
the Culture Industries Unit, Francisco Sánchez from PECA (Estrategical Plan for Culture in
Andalusia), Ana Barbeito, general director of Social Economy and Entrepreneurship in the
Innovation, Science and Enterprise Council, Jose Miguel Gallardo and Pepe de la Rosa from
Proyecto Lunar (a public scheme to promote cultural entrepreneurship in the region), Miguel
Luque who directs CADE (Assistance Centres for Entrepreneurial Development) and David
Luque, general director of the culture department in Córdoba. In Extremadura I spoke with the
directing team of Vivernet (a network of incubators for creative enterprises) and Gabinete de
Iniciative Jóven (a public institute to promote creativity in the region). In Catalonia with Eva
Soria, general coordinator for Visual Arts in Ramón Llull Foundation and Xavier Marcé who
directed the ICIC (Catalonian Institute for Creative Industries). In Madrid with Francesc Fajula,
director of Banespyme (promotion scheme set up by Banesto). In the Basque Country I met
with Pedro Ruíz Aldasoro, director of the Creativity Zentrum (business incubator for creative
enterprises), Isabel Fernández and Paul San Sebastián from Innovandis (a private MA designed
to encourage cultural entrepreneurship in Deusto University), among many others. I have
omitted the transcripts of these interviews as they all are very similar and with slight differences
they repeat the same discourse already described in this chapter. It is interesting to note that a
whole infrastructure has been produced in order to mobilize this discourse. We see how it
comprises operative levels: on top we see political instances (culture ministries, culture councils,
creativity and innovation departments, etc.). This layer establishes the discourse and distributes
funds in order to implement it. On a second level we see a layer of technocrats (civil servants,
advisors and middle ranks) that repeat the discourse and set-up incubators, business units,
funding schemes etc. in which these funds are distributed and materialized. Finally we see a layer
of independent consultants, small cultural enterprises, promoters etc. that give a human face to
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the discourse. These are the people one meets in fairs and events designed to promote
entrepreneurship, give inspirational talks or appear in local media encouraging cultural agents to
become entrepreneurs. In some cases some of these people have set up small enterprises to
promote entrepreneurship which feed on public funding and are deployed as examples of the
benefits of entrepreneurship. Along the following pages I will introduce some of these cases. In
all cases the linear discourse that goes from entrepreneurship to development to economic
growth is present and clear. The following examples have all worked with, received
encouragement from or been mentored by some of these agencies and we will see how the
official discourse is contested by cultural workers.
Becoming Entrepreneurs
Vaquero, one of the co-directors of a Bilbao based enterprise named Socialware that traces
online reputation and provides clients with their digital profiles, talked me through how he set
up the firm with three more partners. From their initial idea, developing a piece of software to
help users track their movements on the net, to their current “star product” ASOMO, several
things have changed, the first being that they now run a business that employs almost 50
workers. Vaquero was trained as a fine artist and he remembers how “in the art world I was
always worrying about what I was going to eat the next day, it sounds a topic but this is true”.
This is the reason why he considered opening a firm. He thinks that “when you are an artist, to
become an entrepreneur seems the most obvious thing to do, the art world doesn't give you any
kind of security and if you want to collaborate with other people the best thing is to turn your
activity into an enterprise in order to have some kind of safety net. That is why so many artists
end up being entrepreneurs”. In a way Vaquero is developing an idea which I have encountered
in many other occasions, namely that entrepreneurship is a way to escape precarity, or at least it
constitutes an attempt to do so. This is the reason why, as he acknowledges, “we are not that
comfortable being branded as businessmen, we don't behave like them, we just want to get paid
for the work we do and in the art world this is extremely difficult”. This dichotomy, being an
artist or an entrepreneur, being poor or to survive form your work, seems to be a powerful
discursive trope that has appeared in almost all the interviews I conducted. The will to escape
from precarity and to normalize one's income is welcome by many public entrepreneurship
promotional schemes which propose the entrepreneurial model as an alternative.
In Cordoba I interviewed Rafael Jurado, one of the founding members of El Dispensario, a
small enterprise that focuses on cultural management and in organizing cultural events with
almost ten years of existence. The key for this company’s 'success' resides in their ability to
diversify and work on several fronts at the same time, now they also run a public scheme to
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promote entrepreneurship in Andalusia. Jurado stated that “when we started we always had
economic results in mind, not because we wanted to become rich, but because it is dignifying to
get paid for what you do. The only way to make a living in the cultural sector is by turning your
activity into an enterprise and become a professional”. Again the debate between precarity vs.
entrepreneurship becomes apparent. Jurado went on to argue “I firmly believe that running your
own company helps you to escape from the precarity that affects the cultural sector. Obviously
the amount of responsibility you must take on board grows, this can cause some strains you
must be prepared to accept”. Somehow the enterprise turns into your business card, people
believe you and trust you more if you behave like a business man. As Jurado argues “being an
enterprise helps you to negotiate deals, as you have more credibility,” so we can see a strategic
use of the company in order to look (not necessarily be) more professional and gain a
reputation.
Sofoco Media is a very different company. Barcelona based, this small firm is run by three
partners and has specialized in offering consultancy and training for fashion brands. Marta
Camps, co-founder of the project, explains that “Sofoco started when a group of friends, which
shared a passion for culture and all worked as freelancers struggling to make a living, decided to
work together under a shared brand, that's how we started”. As in the case of El Dispensario,
they used the name of the company to build a reputation for themselves even though none of
them was trained or knew much about running a business or management; however, at least
now they could write proper invoices and seem more professional. “On our own, we could not
make a living out of our work, by setting the company up we hoped things would change, we
had been working for others but never made enough money. During the first three or four years
we worked long hours and never managed to make that much money, but at least we were
working for ourselves and with our own friends”. Again the will to escape from precarity seems
to be the main driving engine behind entrepreneurship. Even though, the equation doesn't
seem to be perfect - many of these firms display high levels of precarity, discontinuity and are
hardly economically sustainable - but they are all ready to accept these harsh conditions as they
consider this as an investment that will pay back in the future.
One of the enterprises that was more aware of this tension between precarity and
entrepreneurship was RMS La Asociación, a small cultural management firm started in 1999. I
met Sergio and Marta, two of the three partners, at their headquarters in Madrid. They told me
how they started: “we all met whilst studying art history at university and when we finished none
of us could get a proper job. We all did odd jobs in an art gallery or got some work placements
but nothing seemed to be stable. We then set up an exhibition together, but in order to get paid
we needed some kind of legal status, that is the reason why we became a non-profit
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organization. Then we saw that if we wanted to earn some money we needed to become a
proper enterprise so we become a Limited Society, and that was the moment we started to sell
ourselves as curators to public institutions.” They still find it uncomfortable when they have to
define themselves as entrepreneurs, even though with time they got formal training and public
support, their conditions haven't changed that much and they still see themselves as precarious
workers.
Governance and Regulations
Another interesting issue to discuss is how technical elements can condition cultural workers to
become entrepreneurs. In many cases there isn't a will to become more entrepreneurial or to run
a company, but the need to invoice on a regular basis or the fear of getting caught working
without paying taxes, has, in some cases, been the element that has pushed these workers into
starting their own company. In most cases this is the recommendation cultural workers have got
from institutional agencies or advisors - that to start a firm is the safest way to avoid legal and
fiscal problems. Violeta, one of the partners in La Suite, a theatre company from Seville,
explained how “when we started we were just a theatre group, without any VAT number or
legal status, when there was enough work one of us paid the 'autonomos fee41' but that was not
the best way around the problem as we were always worried about whether the tax agency
would catch us or not”. This pressure led them to constitute their firm some years later,
knowing that they would lose money but at least they wouldn't feel the stress of acting illegally.
In Madrid I spoke with Ana and Vicius from Hola Por Qué, a fashion company specialized in
printed silkscreen T-shirts. They admitted that they never wanted to become an enterprise, but
things led them to turn their small workshop into a business. They put it this way: “we spent
about 5 years without any clear aims or real strategies, we knew how to print T-shirts and we
would sell them in small market stalls and in a couple of shops, but never considered ourselves
as an enterprise”. The process from being designers to a firm was slow and bumpy, the main
factor that pushed them into becoming an enterprise was their fear of the consequences of
being caught selling their products without paying taxes. But as they admit “the problem is that
now, three years in, we have started to have some economic returns, but the problem is that
now everything is about the money, we've got more expenses, we have to pay rent, pay taxes,
etc. We only became an enterprise because we feared the tax agency and now we are working
extra hard just to pay for the expenses of being a firm”. The agency with which they worked
41Legal status for Spanish freelance workers. You usually pay a monthly fee in order to produce
invoices and be able to benefit from social security, but in many cases, workers just pay the month in
which they will produce an invoice to avoid costs, but this is an illegal practice.
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helped them to devise a business plan, but they never envisaged how tough it could be to make
a living from their work.
In any case, these examples do not seem an exception as in many cases cultural enterprises don't
start because workers have an ambitious business plan or have an entrepreneurial drive, but
because they are scared that they will get caught by the tax agencies. Most of these companies
find it hard to make any profits, as they pay much more in taxes and fixed costs than what they
gain. RMS in Madrid told me a similar story, “after all these years, we finally decided to set out a
business plan, because after seven years of technically being an enterprise, we figured out we
hardly knew why, we underwent training in a public agency and we designed the business plan.
Things have improved slightly as we are more aware of what we are doing, but by no means can
we argue that we are a successful business”. In some cases, not only did these projects lack a
clear business orientation, but they started-out not knowing a single thing about accounting,
book keeping, taxes etc.
In a remote forest in the province of Cáceres I met the components of Asaco Producciones, a
circus company which combines street theatre with managing a humour-based country resort.
They had recently opened their most ambitious plan so far, the Hotel de la Risa42, having
transformed their camping site into a small holiday resort devoted to humour-therapy and
humour-based activities. They were exhausted after the process and looked back to their origins:
“some 15 years ago we were just a non-profit circus group, we had no idea of how to run all the
business and technical aspects of our project, we just did our shows and tried to get paid for
them. It came to a point in which we started to have loads of bookings, so we decided to
become a company, but we didn't really earn any money, it looked a bit more serious, a difficult
task for a bunch of clowns”. In other cases this transition is contingent on the grants or benefits
these can obtain from the promotion agencies. These can be in many cases crucial factors in
order to help undecided workers to explore entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurs, businessmen, artists, musicians, clowns...
It comes as no surprise that most of the people I interviewed found it hard to identify
themselves as entrepreneurs or business people, as in many cases this decision has been highly
contingent and only in a very few cases did it come as a result of an entrepreneurial drive.
Finding an identity that suits them and with which they feel comfortable seems a difficult task.
In many cases agencies have used the term “cultural entrepreneurs” as a trendy category that is
42
The Laughter Hotel
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far more appealing than businessman or businesswoman, which seem far too serious and fails to
describe the spirit of cultural agents. Pernan Goñi is a comic artist and computer programmer
from Bilbao and he told me a very moving story. He set up a small digital animation company
with some partners and they produced contents for mobile phones. As things started to work,
the amount of pressure and stress mounted to the point in which Pernan decided to quit the
project and try to start a smaller company that suited his needs better. He got in touch with a
local promotion agency named Lan Ekintza who coached him and gave him some training. This
agency has recently produced a booklet on cultural entrepreneurship in which Pernan figures as
an example to follow for young Basque entrepreneurs. But still he didn't really identify with the
figure of a businessman. In his own words “it seems that to be a businessman you need to
attend an expensive business school such as Deusto43 or something similar which I haven't. I
don't come from a wealthy background so I am more an entrepreneur, because I look for ways
to make a living, even though I am not really into businesses and money making.”
I spoke with Kike and Sam during my visit to Cáceres, they run a web design company named
Ochoimedio that was founded in 2003. Both partners were visual artists although they designed
websites and did some programming in order to pay the bills. They never thought about setting-
up a company until they once went to a presentation offered by a local entrepreneurship
promotion agency and after explaining their situation, they were prompted to undertake some
training, and that is how they ended up in a SME incubator. They reckon that “it was very tough
to go from being an artist to be identified as an entrepreneur, and then you spend most of your
time working on the figures and trying to get the taxes right...we always have to pay some thing
or the other. So we don't really feel like business people, well, we sell a product and we try to
make a living, so we might be in business but we don't feel we are proper businessmen. We do
what we can to survive and make a small profit, but we hate managing and all that kind of
stuff.”
This is by no means an isolated case - the members of Asaco Producciones faced a similar
contradiction. As they put it “it’s worse when they call us businessmen than entrepreneurs, we
have always been clowns. The bad thing is that we don't really fit in among business people, but
now we are also strange to the circus people. So yes, we figured out that we are entrepreneurs,
because we try hard to make a living, but we are entrepreneurs that don't seek to make profits,
which is not that conventional. After all, this is a life project, not a business project”. Even
though this can sound weird, we could say that to a certain extent, this is a trait many cultural
entrepreneurs share, they don't become entrepreneurs for the money but they do it because it
43 Well known Basque business school.
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seems the only way to keep doing what they liked doing in the first place. I will explore this
bifurcation from the hegemonic discourses on chapter six, when I analyze alternatives to the
models promoted by the official schemes and agencies.
In Cadiz I met La Mota Ediciones, a publishing firm that produces a well known Rock and Roll
monthly magazine. They seemed to have a more clear idea of how they liked to be called, as they
argued “we are clearly entrepreneurs. If not, we would just sit at home playing with our Play
Station. We are entrepreneurs because we not only set up our own business, but also because we
always try-out new ideas, even though we are clearly not doing this for the money. But we are
entrepreneurs because we try to do things we like.” So again, we can see how a different idea of
entrepreneurship starts fitting into place, in which it's more related to being active and willing to
start new projects than willing to make money out of them. In this case, the magazine hardly
produced any income and they had to make a living out of parallel projects and freelance work.
Another interesting case was Agencia FREAK, a short film distributor with offices in Madrid
and Cáceres that is one of the most important distributors in Spain. I spoke with the two
partners who run the venture, Millán Vázquez and his wife Mónica Gallego who clearly stated:
“we feel we are entrepreneurs even though at the beginning we weren't that conscious about it,
we have opened our own future and we believe in ourselves. When we first enrolled in the
promotion scheme, we didn’t really feel we were entrepreneurs, we just did our own thing, but
now, in perspective and after all the coaching we received, it’s all more clear, the agency help us
to see the entrepreneur inside of us”.
.
But this is not always the case. The members of Hola Por Qué struggled to come to a clear
conclusion on this subject. This was triggered in part by the fact the Vicius has spent more time
on working on the creative aspects of the company whilst Ana has ended up doing management
work and looking after the financial aspects of the project. Viciuos stated “I feel I am an
entrepreneur but not a businessman. We have to learn to do what real enterprises do, there is no
way around that, but I will always be an entrepreneur and not a businessman.” I asked him to
continue to explain why he felt an entrepreneur, he continued, arguing “an entrepreneur is more
about passion whilst a businessman is about money. I am an entrepreneur because I do what I
feel like doing, I haven't got economic ambitions, sometimes I do things just because I like
them, not because they are going to be profitable”. In this moment, Ana had to contradict him,
“you are an entrepreneur because I am left to deal with the boring bits of the company, I have
to be the businesswoman, so you can unleash your creativity. I hate doing all this work, but I
don't want to end up working in Zara, so I am an entrepreneur in order to escape boring work
routines. Nobody wants to become a businessman, being an entrepreneur sounds cooler, but at
the end of the day, it’s just the same.”
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Jave Nevado is one of the two founders of Anti, a bookshop located in the centre of Bilbao. In
a very short period this space has gained a good reputation due to the cultural events that they
organize and the presentations they host. He felt uncomfortable with the ways in which he had
been portrayed as a successful entrepreneur by some promotional agencies. He recalls that “I
never used to consider myself a businessman or an entrepreneur but suddenly the agency that
helped me out to set up the shop and that provided some of the initial investment brought out a
booklet with successful cases of entrepreneurship and I was portrayed in it. To be an
entrepreneur it seems as if you must be brave, and I have many fears and I have struggled to
come to terms with becoming a role model for new business people.” So we can see clearly that
the whole category designed by these promotional schemes does not fit that well and hardly
defines the ways in which these cultural agents see themselves. As we have seen, these
entrepreneurs are not ideologically motivated subjects but pragmatic workers seeking some of
the benefits of operating following a business model. With this I don't want to imply that there
is no kind of ideology underlying the notion of entrepreneurship, but in many cases, cultural
workers are not even conscious of this fact. On the other hand, the fact that most of these
agents are not that concerned about making money and just seem to be motivated by the
possibility of carrying on with their work, suggests that we might want to consider rethinking
the whole notion of entrepreneurship when it is being applied to the cultural field.
Freedom and Dependency
One of the most valued features of entrepreneurship by many of the people I interviewed is the
“freedom” they gain through their entrepreneurial activity. Not having to follow a regular
schedule, not having to work in a dull office space or having the freedom to choose with whom
you work are all considered positive aspects of entrepreneurship. Discursively this translates into
a dichotomy of being dependent or being independent. The first instance is related to following
rules: having a regular salary, rigid timetables and not being able to choose what kind of projects
you work on. Independence seems to translate into the possibility of taking decisions that shape
one’s own life, choosing when and with whom to work, choosing your projects and timetables
etc. RMS subscribed this idea as they argued “cultural work is highly precarious and running
your own firm doesn't save you from that, but at least you get to choose what you spend your
time on or how much you charge for your work”. Conrado, the director of the free newspaper
Avuelapluma, distributed in different cities of Extremadura holds more extreme views on the
freedom you gain becoming an entrepreneur. I interviewed him and asked him about this
subject, he reckons that “you can't be an entrepreneur if you are not a highly independent
person. And running your own project gives you freedom to the highest degree”. This is the
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reason why “when we first started the newspaper, some public promotion agencies asked if we
wanted any help or business coaching, which we refused as we didn't want to see our freedom
jeopardized. We had our freedom and that is the most valuable asset for a private company.”
Putting it this way, it almost feels that entrepreneurship is a form of self-realization; it
constitutes a quest for personal freedom.
In La Suit, in Seville, they shared a similar devotion to their freedom, as they recognized “one of
the advantages of becoming an enterprise is that you get to work on what you want. We could
never go back to working for others. We used to work freelance for public cultural institutions
and we saw clearly that their aims are not cultural, that was really frustrating. We now continue
to work for the public sector but it's different because they pay and we develop our projects and
work as we like.” This leads us to what could seem a paradox, as many of the companies I
interviewed relied heavily on public clients. That implied that many of these enterprises couldn't
really choose with whom they worked with, couldn't decide on deadlines or prices, as in many
cases these were set beforehand. So to a certain extent, independence is clearly linked to the
specific conditions of each project. Rafael from El Dispensario argued that “even though we are
free to choose our clients, I must admit that we primarily work for public institutions, and you
learn to understand their rhythms, they always want something done for tomorrow, they pay
late, they are always slow, etc.” In Ochoimedio I got a similar answer: “we are small so we are
very conditioned by institutional clients, we can't really decide so much, so we might be less free
than what we set out to be”.
On the other hand, those companies that don't rely on public clients need to adapt their
products to the market, which in many cases implies changing dramatically the things on which
they were working to make them fit their client’s needs. Vaquero from Socialware talked me
through this process: “it took a long time to make ASOMO profitable. We first developed
pieces of software named JUDO which were free for people to download and it helped to track
your moves on the internet. The idea behind it was that you could surf the net and then go back
to those places you liked without having to worry about bookmarking them. Everybody
reckoned it was a good idea, but our consultants used to tell us that there was no way of making
money out of it, that was 2001. At the end we re-aimed the product to fit a different type of
client, so we transformed the tool into a service for bosses who wanted to track down their
workers. Slowly we started tracing online reputations and that's how the tool finally was
transformed into a service for firms who seek to understand how they are being perceived. At
the end it has very little to do with our aims to become software developers, as most of the
work we do now has to do with interpreting data”. Other firms have ended up offering
commercial services in order to continue carrying out the activity they set out to do in the first
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place. In La Mota Ediciones I discussed how they have transformed the magazine they publish
into a non-profitable project that helps them gain visibility and is a good way to capture
commercial clients. They put it in the following way: “we keep FREEK! In circulation as if it
was an NGO, now it's our showcase as it allows us to get profitable projects. With the magazine
we couldn't make a living, so we now edit and print for others, we do graphic design, we have
even worked for a coffin factory that needed to market their products for younger people.”
Sergio from RMS was very explicit on this subject:“we are just like Clint Eastwood, we do
commercial cinema to later produce our independent movies. All the money we made during
the first years was invested in smaller more interesting projects”. Even Avuelapluma had to
develop side projects to fund the newspaper; one of them is called NLCE, wedding booklets
with the best moments of the bride and groom's life. So the whole idea of independence could
be easily challenged.
Stress, anxiety and other Maladies...
Working long hours, the lack of skills for managing time, multitasking, excess responsibilities
and the lack of economic rewards have propitiated the appearance of stress, anxiety and other
illnesses which are becoming prevalent in the field of cultural production. Short deadlines, the
will to finish your work properly, ambition, lack of resources and so on push workers into
uncomfortable situations. In Bilbao, Pernan Goñi told me how stress was the reason why he
had to abandon the digital animation company he started-up with two more partners. “I wasn't
enjoying it any more, I wasn't good enough for my colleagues and I felt I was letting them
down. I felt so bad I decided to leave it all behind and start something from scratch.” The
production of digital content for mobile devices takes place in a highly competitive
environment; there are a small number of operators and many content producers. Currently
Pernan has gone back to basics and he is drawing comic strips and working on analogical media.
He is struggling to make ends meet but “at least I am doing what I always wanted to do, draw
comic books.”
Cristina Vega is an activist and researcher who combines cultural production with her job as an
invited lecturer at Madrid University. She admitted that freelancers are exposed to a large
amount of pressure which have never been properly addressed or researched. “Dealing with
several jobs at the same time gets worse when work is project based and you have different
projects running simultaneously. Not being able to generate enough revenues from your
freelance work leads you to take other jobs in non-cultural related areas. These end up funding
culture indirectly.” Marta from Sofoco Media reflected on how life and work have merged and it
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is now extremely difficult to tell them apart. It got to a time when I wasn't able to distinguish if I
was in a party or I was working, the phone keeps ringing at all times, you spend weekends
working, you can't distinguish friends from clients...and then multitasking, which is the worse
condition of our time. This all adds up and exhausts you.” In Hola Por Qué I faced a similar
situation: “we can't really cope with stress...every time we look at the books and see how we are
doing...we just can't take it. The only good thing is that at the end of the day we think, well this
is a personal project, so the brain tricks us, if not, we would go down with some nervous related
illness”. Along the following chapter I will look further into the subjective dispositions that help
to keep people working in the cultural field, seeing how pleasure, coolness or authenticity
function as an apparatus of power.
In HAMACA, a video-art distributor based in Barcelona, Eli Lloveras told me how they had to
decide not to work over the weekends, even though this caused some concern. “Many of the
seminars, projections, festivals, etc. take place on a Friday or Saturday, that implies spending the
weekends travelling and working. If you cannot attend a screening of your own films, it would
let everybody down, but if you spend the weekend working, when you arrive to the office on
Monday you are completely exhausted, and that’s when the phone keeps ringing with enquiries
and clients wanting to rent movies”. In almost all the interviews I conducted the term
“procrastination” appeared recursively and it was inevitable to end up talking about stress,
anxiety or insecurities. The fact that a big number of enterprises struggle to make profits makes
things worse, as most of these workers cannot afford to pay for medical treatments or afford to
take sick leave. All this is detrimental to health and turns these conditions into chronic maladies
that are prevalent in the cultural sector. Eli Lloveras also feels that the tension of not being able
to think about having children, “as I almost have no time to do the laundry, go shopping or
clean my place, I would love to have a baby but under these conditions I feel it is almost
impossible. On the other hand I don’t want to have to wait until I’m 40 and things are more
settled.” Marta Camps from Sofoco decided to go ahead after some years of doubts and had a
child. “At the beginning everybody is kind to you and offer help, but soon tensions start to
grow. You feel you are letting your partners down, they expect a document which you can never
finish, they take on you workload and feel the strain, it all becomes very tense. You end up
feeling guilty for not doing your job properly and not being a proper mother.”
The growing amount of responsibilities you have to take on when you run your own firm, which
can also be a cause for stress, are never mentioned by the entrepreneurship promotion schemes.
Very few cultural entrepreneurs can envisage this pressure before they start their firms and in
most cases it comes as a surprise. Key competences are not clearly outlined, multitasking implies
you have to do things for which you have never been prepared, and when you have employees,
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matters become worse. This was very clear in Socialware in which the quick growth of the
company has come as a surprise to its founders who have struggled to find ways in which to
integrate new workers but still keep the management horizontal. “The growth of responsibilities
has created tensions among us, at times the partners of the firm weren't earning anything but
employees were. We didn't dispose of our own capital so when things went bad we had to take
it on ourselves. So even though we tried to erase the boundaries between owners and
employees, when things get tough, these boundaries become very clear.” In Asaco Producciones
they experienced similar problems, as having workers on their payroll makes them very anxious,
the level of responsibility is too high. “Sometimes anxiety kicks in, all these people depend on
us, their lives depend on whether we take the right or wrong decisions, so we must make sure
we generate enough profits every month to pay the bills, pay staff and be able to earn a little bit
of money ourselves. On many occasions we have thought about closing down and going back to
doing street theatre. Things are too complicated now but we don't want to disappoint the
people at GIJ44 because they really helped us to set it all up.”
When these micro-businesses become stable entities fixed costs rise, tasks multiply and in many
cases this doesn't translate into larger returns. Maru from the social communication enterprise
La Tangente, in Seville, explained how “the good thing about being an entrepreneur is that you
decide on what you work on, the bad thing is working on projects you don't really like but help
to pay the bills, and the constant instability and growing responsibility you have to take on
board. To be honest, sometimes I just couldn't cope.”
In Hola Por Qué, feeling the weight of responsibility had caused some problems. Since we
started “our duties and responsibilities have increased very much. We rented the space, more
expenses, wages, etc. We have really felt ill. It's all so weak...if a project doesn't work it can all
fall to pieces. The only good thing is that we are free to do what we really like.” In their case this
increase in responsibility has not translated into larger benefits, “we are an enterprise but we
don't earn more than before, we've got a bigger space, printing machines, but all our earnings go
on paying the bills. It is true that we look more professional, but we really don't know where all
this will take us. We like the freedom we have gained but also we are dealing with bigger
problems. We would like more help, we are really tired, we spend loads of time doing admin
work and things that have little to do with fashion and design. We are doing a thousand things
at the same time and feel bad if we can't do them all properly. We work to be able to work.”
This last sentence helps to explain labour in the creative industries, people working to be able to
work.
44Public promotion agency in Extremadura that help to capitalise the project at the beginning and has
trained some of the partners.
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Creativity vs Management
Most of the people I interviewed started-up their company because they believed it would be
the safest way to make a living out of what they really liked doing. They entered the creative
industries in search of a ‘creative’ job. But one of the most pervasive problems I encountered
during my field work is the tension created between the will to get on with doing your creative
job and the time you must spend doing admin-based work in order to be able to be creative.
This paradox can become one of the biggest obstacles for cultural work. As I will discuss in the
following chapter, a certain notion of creativity is one of those drives that fuel work in the
cultural sector, but very few cultural entrepreneurs are really aware of the amount of non-
creative work that goes in to these companies to keep them running. It comes to a point that
admin and management work seem to become a real obstacle for creativity.
Many of the companies I interviewed admitted that they are always behind on admin work and
that they always leave it until the last minute; they do it because they have to, but in most cases
they would avoid having to deal with money, taxes, invoices etc. In Hola Por Qué this has been
a big obstacle to their day-to-day activities, “managing, distributing and dealing with payments is
a really tough job, we spend our time designing and doing proper work and at the end of the day
we have to start working on those kind of matters. We are scared that the time will come in
which we will think like a proper company, we never wanted that, but we spend so much time
doing 'money related tasks' that at the end we will think they are a priority. Now we think about
the price of things, how much does time cost, etc. and we hate it, but at the end, you spend so
much time doing these kinds of tasks that you forget about being creative.” This is the case of
many of the companies I interviewed - they lack business skills and aren't prepared to do admin
work, so these aspects of the company start becoming a problem.
Marta and Isabelle from Sofoco Media reckon that “to be an entrepreneur you must make many
sacrifices and it takes a big amount of effort, you must be able to manage, look after the books,
control timetables, know about taxes and fund-raising, etc. and after you have finished with all
that, you must be able to design content and think about future projects. This implies sacrificing
a large amount of time so it got to a time in which we were not that sure if becoming a company
had been the right move, we wanted to design content again.” The tension between being able
to do what they first set the company up for and having to spend so much time doing admin
and management tasks can affect not only one's performance but it can even affect your health.
In Asaco Producciones this dichotomy has on occasions led to dramatic decisions: “we had to
stop doing street shows and performing for a year, to focus on putting everything into place and
making sure we could be profitable. It came to a point that if we didn't do it this way the whole
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thing could collapse. We suffered a lot, it was very tough, and it started to cause so much strain
that we started to feel unwell.” This situation was triggered by a major project they had started
named El Hotel de la Risa, or the Fun Hotel which implied re-scaling and increasing the number
of people they had to hire to make it happen. They also needed a large amount of investment
which they received thanks to a public agency committed to promoting entrepreneurship. In
their words “GIJ helped us, they almost came up with the idea, they got investors involved and
introduced us to bankers, they wanted to actually build a hotel and turn it into a business. We
really just wanted to do circus related leisure activities in the countryside, we weren't that
interested in running a proper hotel. We just got carried away, we were scared of disappointing
all these important people who believed in the project, but we had to do so much admin work
that we almost got sick, we wanted to organize shows and the whole process was driving us
crazy.” Having to look after the business aspects of the project, to the detriment of creative
activities, jeopardized the whole project. Now they have downsized the whole enterprise and
they feel much more comfortable, even though they are in debt.
Jorge from Estoescasa!, a experimental netlabel from Madrid admitted that even though he had
received training and had done business studies “to set up your company is tough, there is so
much bureaucracy, paperwork and numbers, then you have to deal with the schizophrenia of
being a designer or musician that sets up a firm in order to be able to get on with your thing, but
then you spend all your time doing numbers and filling in paper work. That is the price you have
to pay, you just wait for the moment in which you start to make enough cash so you can hire an
accountant, a lawyer, a cleaner, etc. and you can finally spend your time composing or
designing.” The fact is that hardly any of these companies manage to make enough returns to
hire enough staff.
Socialware is having very serious problems trying to combine an assembly based decision taking
strategy, with having to make tough economic decisions. Part of the staff were not ready to
sacrifice for the company and just wanted to be paid and work eight hours, others understood
the situation and knew it couldn't continue that way. This is causing an enormous amount of
problems for the directors, who feel they have failed to build a company with different
priorities. Seeing this problem as a good opportunity for business Mamen and Julio started
Lanzarte, a management company for artists based in Cáceres. They believe that “artists should
concentrate in making art; we will do the management for them. We will look after their work,
will promote them and look after their figures, in exchange we take a percentage of the profits
they make.” Mamen and Julio used to be artists themselves so they know the art market inside
out, and they are well aware that many artists fail to make it because they are overpowered by all
the side tasks they that need to do. So where some see a big problem, others are envisaging a
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business model. At the same time promotion agencies are providing business training for all
these small companies, giving work to consultants, personal trainers and other experts ready to
enhance cultural workers' business skills. In one of the interviews I conducted with a small
theatre group from Malaga (who preferred not to be named) I came across a very interesting
story of how they started. They didn't have any economic aims whatsoever, they were just a
collective willing to put on shows and happy to work together. As they put it “we made all our
decisions horizontally, there was a weekly assembly in which we took all the important
decisions, we distributed responsibilities, we distributed profits when there were, etc. We were
approached by a local agency that showed us how we could benefit from turning into a proper
business and showed us why we couldn't continue being a collective as we were invoicing and
moving money around and that was illegal. After a long discussion we decided to go ahead and
we went through the training, the agency provided a consultant who came twice a week to our
place and helped us to reshape our model to make it more efficient. We had to divide
responsibilities, create departments and operate in a complete different manner. We even started
a business line of corporate events to pay the bills, which we all hated. One day after a show we
were all very tired and disappointed, we hated being a company and we wanted to go back to
horizontal decision making, but that was impossible. The coach had turned us into an efficient
enterprise, not a profitable one, but none of us felt comfortable, two months later we closed
down.” This example helps us to understand that these changes are as much as economical as
political. These consultants introduce a completely new ideology into the collectives who decide
to transform their activities into businesses.
Zemos98, a culture production and communication enterprise from Seville suffered a similar
problem. The consultant that helped them to shape their business set up different departments
which had very little to do with how they were used to operate. These small enterprises have
learnt to function organically, friends and clients are usually the same, hierarchies are usually
dismissed and there is no need to generate departments, as in most cases, everybody does a bit
of everything. But this goes against management theory and business coaches are not willing to
experiment with new formats or ways of operating. So there is a clear ideological construction
of what an enterprise should be and how an entrepreneur should behave like, which does not
usually go down that well with these cultural enterprises. “After we worked on branding, we
took on a corporate attitude, we saw how our friends and collaborators started to feel alienated
from the project. It’s not the same to collaborate with a collective than to work for free for an
enterprise”. The communities and networks in which these projects are inscribed can become
suspicious of these companies as in fact, they are trading and selling common knowledge. Hola
Por Qué tells a similar story: “our friends started to become reluctant to help, they thought we
were using them to make a profit and they stopped supporting and backing up the project.”
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These small enterprises do not only pool on the common knowledge but also on the resources
(friends, communities, families) close to them. The more business-like, the less prone these
subjects are willing to collaborate. These companies seem to constitute a threat to the
communities from which they emerge, as they constantly need to pool their resources from the
environment in which they function, as economic returns are always frail and inconsistent. So
again we see how the traditional notion of entrepreneurship can exhaust the cultural commons
on which all these enterprises operate.
Conclusions: Entrepreneurship Revisited
As we have seen in this chapter, a new economic figure has been introduced into the cultural
sector. Entrepreneurship implies a complex model of government, a set of subjective
dispositions, regulations and a network of agencies that promote and enable collectives and
cultural agents to turn into enterprises. Part of the work these have done consisted in creating a
specific role model or figure which we know as the cultural entrepreneur, which has been
presented as the “natural” culmination of an evolution of an economic cycle. In the following
chapter I will discuss in more detail these role models and the ideas that go into them. With
Foucault we have seen how the figure of the entrepreneur goes hand in hand with a neoliberal
discourse based on individual freedom and the importance of the market as a regulator.
Entrepreneurship becomes a governmental model which does not work from top down as it did
in the disciplinary societies, but through a complex network of public and private bodies,
implementing a number of different policies, but also giving enough space to the actors for
them to find roles that will suit their needs. We have also seen how cultural producers, trying to
escape from precariousness, have started to adopt more “business like” structures. In this sense
they have been a perfect target for a set of policies willing to promote entrepreneurship. They
are willing to escape from the insecurities inherent in cultural practice and they hope that the
entrepreneurial model can improve their living conditions. Possibly this is one of the reasons
why, when confronted with a number of policies that promoted a more entrepreneurial attitude
towards cultural work, they have not been perceived negatively and have been partly assumed by
some of the agents in the field.
One could argue that this subjective construction facilitates the implementation of governance
as a form of government, normalizing ways of working, helping to define forms of behaviour
and “appropriate cultures”. This is one of the reasons why we could state that the whole
entrepreneurial discourse should be read as a political endeavour and not merely as a purely
economic project. Historically the promotion of the creative industries has run parallel to the
growth of governance as a political project, and although acknowledging that there are no
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specific links that could prove that these are strongly related (the sociologist Tony Bennett has
worked on this point, see Bennett 1998a 1998b), there have been attempts to connect this in a
concise way. Bennett argues that “culture emerges as a pluralized and dispersed field of
government, which, far from mediating the relations between the civil society and the state or
connecting the different levels of a social formation, operates through, between and across these
in inscribing cultural resources into a diversity of programmes aimed at directing the conduct of
individuals toward an array of different ends” (Bennett, 1998a: 77). This attempt to homogenise
the identity of the workers in this specific field, in a process that has affected to different
degrees the whole of the work force (as described in Rose, 1989) in the last 60 years, can only
reflect how this “dispersed field of government” is working through the bodies of its agents, in
order to normalize certain economic behaviours.
I have also shown how the discourses and models devised by public agencies devised to
promote entrepreneurship do not always settle smoothly and fit the needs of collectives and
cultural workers used to operate in different manners. In this sense it is interesting to look at the
contradictions, problems, refusals and dichotomies that are currently taking place. I believe that
the notion of cultural entrepreneurship is being constantly renegotiated, and that many small
enterprises are struggling to come to terms with the fact that they are being portrayed as role
models for other cultural entrepreneurs. I have shown that they don't feel comfortable being
branded business people, and only in very few cases do these micro-businesses really have
strong economic aims. In order to become sustainable, many of these micro-enterprises need to
tap into the networks, communities and families that surround them. The lack of investment or
capital must be compensated with time, favours, help, collaboration, affects, ideas and money
gathered from the social networks in which these enterprises operate. These can feel alienated if
the projects become too money-orientated or display corporate attitudes, but in any case the
main sources of revenue come from bigger business structures that subcontract them or public
institutions. Entrepreneurship implies departing from these resources, but in many cases there is
not any economic capital to be gained to compensate this loss. On the other hand these
companies that privatize common knowledge and ideas can constitute a threat to the
communities in which they operate pushing these projects far from sustainability. In the
following chapters I will explore this reality with some bifurcations from the hegemonic
discourse and alternatives to traditional entrepreneurship. Along this chapter I have described
the reality of cultural entrepreneurship and the conditions in which many of these small
companies operate, but still, I haven’t provided an answer as to why many of these workers
remain in this sector enduring harsh conditions and with little prospects of achieving economic
profits beyond sustainability. In the following chapter I will go deeper into the subjective
categories and discursive elements that make this kind of work so appealing.
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Chapter 5
Individualization of Work II: Between
precarity and coolness, or the discrete
pleasure of creative work
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We have undoubtedly entered a new era, one that
perhaps was set irreversibly in motion by the
uprisings of 1968
Negri & Hardt
As we have seen in the previous chapter, entrepreneurship promotional schemes and their
interaction with policies, agencies, grants and other incentives have propitiated the appearance
of a vast number of micro-enterprises that comprise of what has been branded as the creative
industries. It could be argued that these elements on their own cannot explain the emergence of
the vast number of micro-enterprises that configure this sector. In the following chapter I will
discuss how certain notions of freedom, coolness, creativity, authenticity or happiness at work,
have helped constitute the subjective elements that provide an understanding as to why so many
people feel inclined to join a sector well known for the large levels of insecurity, flexibility and,
as how some post-autonomous Marxists have termed it ,“precarity”. Along the following lines I
will explore two well established hypothesis that try to explain the rise of these “creative
subjectivities”; on the one hand, the arguments posed by post-autonomous Marxists which
sustain that what we are facing is a stage of capitalism in which the critiques and demands
formulated by the workers during the sixties and seventies have been internalized and
transformed into imperatives. On the other hand, I will explore the Foucaultian tradition, which
as I have introduced in previous chapters, sustains that these notions of freedom, creativity or
pleasure at work just constitute forms of neoliberal governance which have been internalized by
cognitive workers.
Empirically it has been proven that the enterprises that constitute the creative industries hardly
ever scale-up and grow beyond five to six initial partners (Leadbeatter and Oakley 1999,
Hesmondhalgh 2007, Hartley 2005, Rowan 2010), who will later employ freelance workers to
build the loose productive networks that characterise this sector. These freelancers,
independents, autonomous workers or casual creative workers, interact with a large number of
these firms and combine periods of employment and unemployment, slipping from formal to
informal labour. In France these workers have been branded as the “intermittants du spectacle”
(Corsani 2005, Lazaratto 2004), and in the Italian tradition the term “precariat” (Berardi 2003,
2010) has been deployed to describe the working conditions these subjects face. In all cases,
these accounts describe a grim picture characterised by high levels of flexibility, work
discontinuity, lack of resources, uncertainty and “a set of material and symbolic conditions, that
determine an uncertainty in terms of a sustained access to the basic resources to the full
development of the life of any given subject” (Precarias a la Deriva, 2004). These harsh work
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conditions have been covered by layers of discourses and images that portray creative workers
as cool, happy and self-motivated subjects willing to invest physical, mental and emotional
energies in creative jobs. How can this paradox be explained? How do these two realities share a
common space? Questions I will address in the following pages.
We got what we’ve demanded: the new spirit of capitalism
In the book Crisis de la clase media y posfordismo (Bologna, 2006), the Italian post-autonomist
author sets out some of the parameters to understanding the current conditions of work in
Europe and discloses the emergence of what he has branded as “autonomous employment”,
that is freelance or self-entrepreneurial work. In his book he establishes a history of self-
employment describing the different stages and ways this kind of work has existed. Sharing the
views that Boltanski and Chiapello have exposed in their well known book “The New Spirit of
Capitalism” (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005)45., and following the “autonomist” tradition,
Bologna locates the emergence of autonomous work as we know it in the social and cultural
revolts now known as May of 1968. As Bologna writes “in 1968 a new social tendency grew in
which people started searching for alternative life models” (Bologna, 2006: 36); and whilst
traditional values were put into question, work as such was also challenged. The cultural
commentator Isabel Lorey in her article “Governmentality and Self-Precarization”, explores this
moment and writes “the thoroughly dissident practices of alternative ways of living, the desire
for different bodies and self-relations (in feminist, ecological, left-radical contexts), persistently
aimed to distinguish themselves from normal working conditions and the associated constraints,
disciplinary measures and controls. Keywords here are: deciding for oneself what one does for
work and with whom; consciously choosing precarious forms of work and life, because more
freedom and autonomy seem possible precisely because of the ability to organize one’s own
time, and what is most important: self-determination”(Lorey, 2008: 72). New forms of
organization started coming into place, old hierarchies were dismissed and horizontality was
introduced into the workplace.
As Bologna reminds us “the strong drive towards self-organization displayed by cultural agents
and their ability to design self-managed initiatives, set out the conditions to understand different
life alternatives, leaving behind more traditional notions of autonomous employment”(Bologna,
2006:36). Workers were redefining their aspirations and they were exploring new abilities and
competences, new qualities started to become valorised and the cognitive and affective
dimensions of work were starting to become predominant. Bologna argues that “the 1968
45 The following references have been extracted from the Spanish translation of the book.
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generation (...) started to discover and trust their relational skills. This was a new workforce,
particularly well suited to the needs imposed by a service based economy and the media. In this
way, due to a complex set of reasons, this social segment comprised many of the positive and
negative characteristics needed to give rise to autonomous labour” (Bologna, 2006:38).
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello also located temporally in this precise moment what they
named the emergence of “artistic critique”. Maurizio Lazaratto describes this form of social
activism as “a critique based on demanding freedom, autonomy and authenticity” as opposed to
“social critique which is based on solidarity, security and equality” (Lazaratto, 2008:101). In
many cases these two trends of militancy stem from different social groups and often they are
incompatible. Artistic critique demands more flexibility in the workspace, more autonomy and
the introduction of creativity and imagination in corporate cultures; altogether these constitute
radical impositions on Fordist modes of production based on seriality and repetition. In
Boltaniski and Chiapello’s account, these demands set out the foundations from which post-
Fordism will emerge. In this narrative contemporary forms of labour are designed after
corporations acknowledged and internalized these new forms of critique instead of attending
social demands. This way artistic critique was transformed into the core motor of many changes
that would alter work models and life patterns for ever. The system assumed its critique and
transformed it into an imperative. The demands for flexibility were transformed into generalized
flexibility, creativity was imposed as an obligation and autonomy and self-realization through
work were considered indispensable qualities of contemporary labour.
In the genealogy proposed by Bologna during the 1980s, all those demands put forward by
workers and students during the 1968 revolts started to be considered compulsory changes that
companies and corporations had to face-up to. Vertical structures started to become downsized
giving rise to smaller horizontal structures. At the same time, the Washington Consensus and the
neoliberal policies it dictated, promoted the extreme flexibility of work schedules, creativity
became an imperative and workers were pushed into being reflexive self-regulated (and self-
accountable) entrepreneurs. Autonomous employment becomes a predominant modality of
work as it incorporates the demands for freedom, autonomy and flexibility that characterised the
revolts. All these changes have been widely debated by sociologists, anthropologist and labour
analysts, the German sociologist Gerd Vonderach is one of the most prominent authors that
has worked on the emergence of autonomous labour. In 1980 he wrote a book named The New
Autonomous: 10 thesis for a sociology of an unexpected event (Vonderach, 1980), in which he argues that
these “new autonomous workers” do not only establish new work models, but introduce a
completely new work ethics that differentiates them from previous Fordist workers. He claims
that these new workers don’t differentiate private leisure and work, private life from work
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sociability, and they experiment with new ways of understanding production and reproduction.
They escape from rationalized work environments to introduce a much more playful approach
to labour.
Vonderach believes that the emergence of this new work ethics has to do with the fact that
most of these workers are young people that reject the models imposed on their parents who
suffered the constraints of limitations of Fordist work regimes. This does not differ that much
from certain passages of Richard Sennet’s The Corrosion of Character, in which he clearly outlines
this generational break. This refusal of serialized and repetitive work modes helps us to
understand many of the demands that comprise “artistic critique”; this was also noticed by
Leadbeater and Oakley, who in The New Independents report, argued that this refusal was a key
element to understanding the appearance of cultural entrepreneurs in the UK.
This autonomist tradition departs from the critiques formulated by authors such as Marcuse,
which in his One-dimensional Man, depicts a negative dialectic that transforms rationality into
domination and turns human creativity, desire and energy into labour power. As he clearly puts
it “nothing could be more rational than the suppression of individuality in the mechanization of
socially necessary but painful performances; the concentration of individual enterprises in more
effective, more productive corporations” (Marcuse, 2002:3). In this Fordist scenario ideas,
drives and creativity are constantly standardized and repressed, human thought is condensed
into productive energy and freedom becomes a mere enunciation. As a result of this, Marcuse
argues that “a pattern of one-dimensional thought emerges and behaviour in which ideas,
aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse
and action, are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe” (Marcuse, 2002:14).
Taylorism and Fordism have provided certain economic wellbeing and stability, which in
Marcuse’s view help to ameliorate and mitigate some of the worst evils of repetitive and
standardized labour. But this wellbeing was put into question in the midst of the sixties, and this
growing discomfort grew into different forms of protest and social movements that challenged
the hegemony of Fordism.
In his book Precarious Rhapsody the Italian post-autonomist author Franco Berardi “Bifo” traces
the lines of connection between different forms of social unrest that took place in the world
from the mid-sixties to the late seventies and situates in these movements the founding stones
of cognitive capitalism and the modes of production we are currently facing. In his
autobiographical account he explains how “in a certain sense it could be said that we are
witnessing the realization of a nightmare, of the dystopian imagination that was present in the
movement that exploded in 1977” (Berardi, 2010:15); those demands for freedom, autonomy,
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happiness or creativity have been transformed into imperatives from which one cannot easily
escape in contemporary capitalism. Berardi focuses on the different forms of exodus from the
Fordist factory and how this refusal to work can be found in movements such as the hippies in
the US, the autonomists in Italy or the students in France in May 1968 in which “a massive
refusal of the sadness of work was the leading element behind their protest” (Berardi, 2010:18).
I want to flag up this idea of sadness as one of the core emotions that characterizes Fordism,
because as I will argue later, it has been replaced by a notion of happiness that needs to be
challenged.
Different rights were demanded, the right to be lazy, the right to be happy or the right to let
imagination rule the production lines. But what nobody expected is that “capital” would react
mirroring the demands and transforming them into the current conditions of production. As
Berardi clearly explains, “workers demanded freedom from capitalist regulation, then capital did
the same thing, but in a reverse way. Freedom from state regulation has become economic
despotism over the social fabric. Workers demanded freedom from the life-time prison of the
industrial factory. Deregulation responded with the flexibilization and the fractalization of
labor”(Berardi, 2010:76). As an extreme example of the ways in which capital has introduced the
workers demands and transformed them into impositions, Berardi explains how he remembers
that “one of the strong ideas of the movement of autonomous proletarians during the 1970s
was the idea ‘precariousness is good.’ Job precariousness is a form of autonomy from steady
regular work, lasting an entire life” (Berardi, 2010: 77). If it is true that precariousness was a
demand that came from the workers, in a very sad way, the demands were listened to and taken
into account.
In another of his works, Berardi locates in these protests and demands the emergence of a
collective will to “personal happiness and self-realization which derive from the impossibility to
endure the industrial mode of production” (Berardi, 2003:52). This author describes how in the
industrial-based economies, subjects were forced to leave their personal creativity and
intelligence outside the factory walls, they were de-personalized and transformed into mass
labourers, replaceable elements in a production line. This leads to feelings of alienation and was
central to some of the harshest critiques of the Fordist regimes of production. This process has
now been reverted and the personal elements that differentiate one worker from the other are
valorized in contemporary work. As we saw in chapter one, creativity and knowledge are central
to production. So in a way, we are seeing that we are moving from a stage in which alienation
was predominant to one in which all those personal traits have been captured and transformed
into sources of value. For Berardi this helps to explain why “so many of the people who took
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part in the antiauthoritarian, anarchist and autonomous movements from the seventies, have
become innovative entrepreneurs in the eighties and nineties” (Berardi, 2003:55).
So we can see a clear argument put forward by Bologna, Boltanski & Chiapello or Berardi,
which locates in the social and political movements that took place in the sixties and seventies
the origin of the contemporary regimes of production characterized by a valorization of
creativity, playfulness and knowledge but at the same time in which we suffer from extreme
forms of flexibility, discontinuity and precarity. Fordism and the harsh work conditions it
imposed led to the emergence of “unidimensional” workers, alienation and a refusal to certain
forms of worker subjectivities. From this refusal new forms of understanding work emerged,
forms in which creativity, happiness and authenticity were to become central.
Govermentality and other technologies of the self
In the previous chapter I have already argued, following Foucault’s ideas, that the contemporary
forms of neoliberal capitalism are based on certain forms of rationality that were put into place
by liberal political economists. As we have seen the figure of the neoliberal entrepreneur just
follows the logic set up by several layers of undisputed discourses; this figure constitutes the
space in which certain forms of liberal rationalities become articulated in “technologies of the
self ” (Foucault, 1990). These technologies constitute ‘apparatus’ (dispositifs), practices or
regulations aimed at constituting certain subjective dispositions and they produce certain
emotions, beliefs or selves that suit the different constellations of power. Foucault has argued
that these different technologies (confessions, physical practices, forms of meditation etc.),
which he starts analyzing in ancient Greece, help to attach the person to certain discourses,
producing the subjective dispositions that get meshed with the forms of rationality and
prevailing articulations of power. The French philosopher looks into the mutations of these
‘technologies’ in time, seeing how certain notions developed by Greek philosophy are assumed
and transformed by early Christianity to later scrutinize how these elements are taken up in
medieval Europe and are the basis of certain punishment regimes. In the following chapter I
will look into how certain Foucauldian scholars have developed this argument looking into
contemporary technologies of the self. Thinkers such as Nikolas Rose, Jaques Donzelot, Peter
Fleming, or even Andrew Ross, dispute the autonomist interpretation and locate the production
of the current subjective dispositions in a longer historical narrative. The introduction of
happiness, creativity, flexibility, authenticity or imagination in the workplace, are not the product
of the struggles of the workers during the sixties and seventies, but constitute subjective
dispositions produced through technologies of the self that started to be implemented in the
early days of Fordism.
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The British social theorist, Nikolas Rose provides a very different account of how these
different concerns were introduced into the discourses that define labour. In his views we need
to go back to WWI and the different forms of collecting data of the soldier’s psychological
traits, to understand how what he calls ‘psy’ techniques started becoming a widespread
technology that enabled the military to disclose the validity and mental state of the troops. He
reckons that ‘psy’ techniques have created and developed the languages that produce and shape
forms of contemporary subjectivity. That is why he believes that we need to look at the first
attempts to introduce mass psychological descriptions of the population in order to find the
seeds of contemporary subjectivity. He argues that “our repertoires of subjectivity-feelings,
intentions and motivations can hence be understood as historically contingent features of ways
of speaking of language games” (Rose, 1989:xviii); whoever has the power to introduce these
new languages and depictions of the self has the power to shape the subjects that will use these
words to define themselves. This theorist not only looks at those programmes and institutions
designed to measure the psychological traits of the soldiers, but also those schemes aimed at
ameliorating the negative effects of the harsh conditions workers endured whilst producing
ammunition. Back in the factories in the UK “the pace and intensity of war work was having
effects on the health and behaviour of munitions workers, and this in its turn was taking a toll
on productivity and efficiency. It was of vital military importance to discover ways in which
these effects might be minimized and the labour process organized to maximize efficiency and
minimize fatigue, accidents and illness” (Rose, 1989:65). In this context Rose traces the
appearance of the Industrial Fatigue Research Board, which was set up to “to investigate the
relations of hours of labour and other conditions of employment including methods of work,
to the production of fatigue, having regard both to industrial efficiency and to the production
of health among the workers” (Rose, 1989:65). This locates the concern for the working selves
at the beginning of the twentieth century, challenging the narratives discussed earlier.
Rose traces a number of institutions, schemes and research programmes aimed at improving the
conditions in the workspace, combining physical research as ergonomics with psychological
techniques designed to provide an understanding and improvement of the mental life of the
workers. It is in this context that notions such as self-actualization, autonomy or happiness at
work, start to become recurrent discursive elements. It is in this context in which work became
“a means of self-fulfillment, and the pathway to company profit became also the pathway to
individual self-actualization” (Rose, 1989:xxix). This is an extremely important change in the
history of labour that needs to be taken into account. Only through understanding this fact can
we explain the importance of management and how “the management of subjectivity has
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become a central task for the modern organization. Organizations have come to fill the space
between the private lives of citizens and the public concerns of rulers” (Rose, 1989:2). These
managers are central elements in the introduction of the ‘psy’ discourses in the workplace and
their mission was to align the needs of desires of the workers with the needs of the enterprise.
The production of self-actualizing autonomous workers needs to be understood in the midst of
industrial reorganizations aimed at improving productivity. As Rose clearly depicts it
“industrialists, managers, philanthropists, psychologists and others have initiated a series of
reforms of the workplace, claiming to be able to radically restructure the working relation, to
make work pleasurable for the worker at the same time as it is profitable for the employer. These
different attempts to transform work see the subjectivity of the worker not only as a value to be
respected rather than subjugated, but also a central determinant of the success of the company”
(Rose, 1989:56).
Management and human resources departments work in order to bind these newly described
emotions with the needs of the enterprise. New languages are produced in order to articulate
productivity with these newly coined needs with the changes in production and the interests of
corporations and enterprises. This is how “the desire for productivity led to the maximization
of the contribution of the worker to the objectives of the enterprise, its output, efficiency, and
profitability. The financial incentive of the wage came to be supplemented by a range of
physical, technical, and psychological interventions upon the capacities, motives, enthusiasm and
commitment of the worker” (Rose, 1989:62). Creativity, autonomy, flexibility or happiness, are
just part of these supplements devised in order to maintain the worker attached to the
enterprise and ensure productivity. In this narrative, workers were just demanding what a
complex set of scientific, psychological and economic narratives had produced.
Pleasure or happiness in work is one of the subjective dispositions created by these technologies
of the self. In the process of production of pleasure, horizontal structures were introduced,
democratic management was implemented, ergonomic furniture designed and the boundaries
that separate work from leisure were erased. The links between the feelings and aspirations of
the worker and those of the enterprise were synchronized in order to improve productivity and
personal wellbeing. In this new environment the worker is treated as “an individual in search of
meaning, responsibility, a sense of personal achievement, a maximized quality of life, and hence
of work. Thus the individual is not to be emancipated from work, perceived as merely a task or
a means to an end, but to be fulfilled in work, now construed as an activity through which we
produce, discover, and experience our selves” (Rose, 1989:104). A new working self was slowly
built; using those words and aspirations defined by ‘psy’ techniques, the flexible, autonomous,
creative and aspirational worker was bred. This process was by no means a linear of
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programmed development but emerged from the intersection of several institutions, practices,
discourses, techniques and contradictions. During the late sixties all these developments gave
rise to a “new, international, and self-consciously progressive politics of the workplace” (Rose,
1989:104). There were many differences in these different schemes but the results were quite
similar: the entrepreneurial, competitive, accountable, happy worker.
The Moroccan social theorist Eva Illouz, has also worked extensively on portraying the impact
of psychoanalysis in contemporary management. In her book Saving the Modern Soul Therapy,
Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help (Illouz, 2008), focuses on how a set of appropriate emotions
have been defined to later be introduced into the workspace. This has favoured a process of
rationalization of the human emotions, in which happiness, loyalty or empathy, have been
branded as appropriate emotions to be displayed in public whilst anger, resentment or
disappointment, should be kept under control and excluded from productive sites. In this sense
management started concentrating on the worker’s “personality”, as they noticed that personal
wellbeing led directly to greater productivity. Anger, frustration or sadness, had to be
extinguished from the modern corporations and replaced with positive feelings, a new ethos for
the workplace was being defined and a new worker was being produced: a worker that was in a
quest for happiness and success that needed to rely on his or her brains and emotions in order
to achieve his or her goals. As Illouz writes “psychologists required a new form of emotional
control, one that combined two attributes: the ability of being rational in the search for personal
interest, but also the capacity of erasing conflicts and establishing friendly relationships with
your colleagues”(Illouz, 2008:109). Whilst new buzzwords such as empathy or emotional
intelligence were introduced, the need to focus on communication was highlighted, and the
contemporary worker was prompted to look deeper and deeper into him or herself in order to
get in touch with their inner feelings, searching for an individual human being, that focused on
self-interest, but knew how to establish appropriate relations with their colleagues. This
combination of narcissism, rationality, individualism and emotional control, was the result of
several technologies of the self deployed in the workspace for a great part of the twentieth
century.
Coinciding with the Marxist critique exposed earlier, Rose acknowledges that this movement in
search of the self-actualized self constituted a move away from previous forms of radical
politics or worker movements in which unions had an important role to play. Now the
individualized self seeks personal wellbeing and the function of management is to align personal
interests with the interests of the corporation, a task in which contemporary management seems
to have succeeded. Andrew Ross, continues researching this movement that leads to what he
calls the ‘humanization of the workplace’ looking at how these developments and techniques
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evolved in the context of those technology-based firms that were part of the “new economy”.
In his book No Collar (Ross, 2003), he introduces a powerful depiction of the dynamics and
politics that took place in a number of new media, design or IT companies in the United States.
During the well documented and brief boom and bust (see Henwood, 2003), many of these
companies managed to produce a very specific ethos and social imaginary in which coolness,
fun and games, overshadow precarity, sacrifice and exploitation, which has pervaded and had an
important impact on the creative industries. Ross argues that “by the 1990s, it was widely
believed that the pursuit of the good life was no longer compatible with full-time employment
in corporate America” (Ross, 2003:8), neoliberal policies were at their best and a massive
downsizing movement was pushing many white collar north American workers into
unemployment. Many of these workers were seduced by this new sector in which growth was
steady, profits were rocketing, and in which for the first time, workers felt they could really enjoy
their work. A new breed of enterprises were born and they displayed a complete new set of
values and qualities. Ross argues that in a way “the internet workplace was alleged to have
absorbed a healthy dose of the pre-commercial spirit of Net Culture” (Ross, 2003:27), which
helps to explain certain traits that were infused into these new workspaces: the notions of
community, collectivity, sacrifice and loyalty, that shaped the hacker ethic (Levy, 1994), were now
transformed into a norm of conduct. Possibly the working environment created at the
headquarters of Apple Macintosh has been one of the most widely publicized, especially the
slogan some of the workers displayed on their t-shirts, in which one could read 90 hours and
loving it. Labour regulations disappeared in these project-based enterprises in which competitions
among programmers and strong deadlines defined the working patrons. In this context self-
accountability and sacrifice defined the relationship between the workers and the organization.
In these ‘humane workplaces’, important decisions were not made around mahogany tables or in
closed spaces: managers, directors and programmers would play table tennis, drink coke and
interact in a casualized environment. Grey work-boxes were substituted with open and
horizontal work environments. The ‘spiritual life of the worker’ (Thrift, 2005) was now taken
into account and special meditation rooms were built into new media companies. Facilities were
put into place with a very clear aim, boost productivity whilst promoting creativity, and ‘pleasure
in work’. The French sociologist Jacques Donzelot has studied the origins of this notion of
pleasure, and the discourses that have lead to its appearance in the French business culture.
Heavily influenced by Foucault and in line with the ideas put forward by Ross, Donzelot argues
that a series of measures have been put into place which “are intended to make work come to
be perceived not just as a matter of pure constraint but as a good in itself: as a means towards
self-realization”(Donzelot, 1991: 251).
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Managers and corporations have invested heavily in the production of these techniques that
produce happiness and pleasure in the workspace. In this context the work of authors such as
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi or Daniel Pink and their notions of flow or self-motivation, gain
importance as they define the importance of pleasure in order to promote productivity and
personal wellbeing. Corporations now expect the worker to “redeploy his capacities according to
the satisfaction one obtains in one´s work, one’s greater or lesser involvement in it, and its
capacity thoroughly to fulfill one’s potentialities” (Donzelot, 1991: 252). The worker must
establish strong bonds with his colleagues, enjoy his work, develop his or her qualities, fulfil his
or her drives and find personal pleasure and fulfilment in work. Donzelot argues that this
discourse is put into place following a double aim, first as a way to contain the exodus of
discontent Fordist workers from the factories or corporations, establishing new links between
the workforce and the employers, and second, to lower the social costs of having to deal with ill,
depressed, or injured workers. As Donzelot writes, the involvement of workers in the “collective
pursuit of safety worked only when workers had a sense of their own competence being duly
recognized, of good relations with their supervisors and of actually being allowed the possibility
to reflect on the operation of their work” (Donzelot, 1991: 266). Pleasure in work is defined as
a form of governmentality, it helps to mitigate refusal to work and it strengthens the bonds
between employers and employees, providing a meaning for work.
Systems of production of pleasure
As a consequence of these measures and ideas, we can see how the eighties and nineties
experienced a growing concern in capturing and generating environments in which workers
could explore and realize their subjectivities, in which knowledge could be quantified and
managed and in which personal achievements would constitute the real gratification. At the
same time, we see the growth of a completely new way of working, as now labour-time would
not be considered the most effective way to measure and manage productivity, as project-based
work erupted and took over. This new productive mode challenged many assumptions and ways
in which work used to be understood, time became flexible and workers needed to adapt to
periods of a high work load, which they combined with time in which they had to seek for new
projects or invest in “improving their human capital”. This characteristic of autonomous work
again reifies Foucault’s notion of a society comprised of self-enterprises which compete with
each other.
At the same time, in Japan, corporations experienced with new forms of managing knowledge
(see Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995), and in the United States and Europe management was
concerned with capturing creativity and the entrepreneurial aspects of the corporation’s workers
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(Drucker, 2007; Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005; Du Gay, 2007). What I am going to describe in the
following lines is a process of production of certain worker subjectivities, and affective
dispositions that have influenced the ways in which a worker perceives him or herself and the
ways we experience contemporary labour. Under this umbrella concept of the “pleasure in
work”, I will try to identify three basic concepts that management has mobilized which have
very important consequences in the ways cultural work was to be later understood and
conceptualized: creativity, happiness and authenticity. These three categories also imply an
important shift in the ways in which people experience work, which goes from being a collective
enterprise to an individual source of pleasure. Happiness, creativity or authenticity, are lived as
singular experiences, not collective aims; again they help to produce the process of
individualisation that we have described in previous chapters.
Creativity
As the curator and cultural analyst Marion Von Osten reminds us, “during the 18th century,
creativity was defined as being a central characteristic of the artist, who was said to perpetually
conjure the world anew as an autonomous ‘creator’ ”(Von Osten, 2007:52), but now a major
discursive shift has occurred and the notion of creativity has become a generalized quality; all
workers are expected to become creative. This democratization of a quality that used to be
related to the “artistic genius”, has progressively become a social imperative: everybody must be
creative. In this sense the development of the “inherent creativity”, that lies at the core of every
human being is a compulsory condition for the forms of subjectivity that are being produced in
the midst of cognitive capitalism. Management, think tanks, education consultants and
politicians, have contributed to naturalize and depoliticize the notion of creativity, which in
some cases has ended up describing an economic sector (as is the case of the creative
industries), or new social compositions (as in the case of the now infamous creative class).
For the urban theorist, consultant and guru Richard Florida, creativity has become the central
productive element in post-industrial societies. He shares this idea with other urban developers,
such as Charles Landry, who would agree with Florida that in the 21st century “creativity is the
driving force of economic growth” (Florida, 2002:xxvii). Similarly Landry writes at the beginning
of his best-selling book Creative Cities “cities have one crucial resource - their people. Human
cleverness, desires, motivations, imagination and creativity are replacing location, natural
resources and market access as urban resources” (Landry, 2008:xiii). It is remarkable that in the
case of these two authors, no real effort is made to understand the nature of this creativity or to
analyze exactly how it operates, but in both cases we see that creativity is not so much an
individual quality but a set of aspects that improve contemporary productivity. In the case of
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Richard Florida we see how he mobilizes a social notion of creativity when he deploys the
notions of “creative class”, with which he defines a series of subjects that tend to congregate in
specific urban areas, share common interests (they tend to be culture friendly, tolerant and
multicultural subjects) and gather together under this alien notion of class. I must make it clear
that Florida uses a very different notion of class to that coined by Karl Marx, as he writes “a
class is a cluster of people who have common interests and tend to think, feel and behave
similarly” (Florida, 2002:8). This new class is composed of designers, software developers,
artists, writers, musicians, engineers etc. - “people don’t just cluster where the jobs are. They
cluster in places that are centres of creativity” (Florida, 2002:7). In that sense we are seeing the
possible emergence of a social composition whose demographics are not characterized by
common aims, collective intentions or affiliations, but by extremely individualized subjects,
willing to explore and enjoy their creative qualities. This class doesn’t unionize or share
collective struggles, these subjects seem to display a hedonistic tendency to enjoy their creativity.
This is one of the main differences from “normal people” as Florida makes it clear that “people
are driven by money, but studies find that truly creative individuals, from artists and writers to
scientists and open-source software developers are driven primarily by internal
motivations”(Florida, 2002:34). This helps to make a very important point, as in most cases
creativity has been transformed into the final aim of work. Labour now is considered a space or
a medium through which one can develop his or her own creativity; the final aim is not to make
money, but realize your internal potential. The promise of creativity helps to mobilize workers
and re-deploy them in certain urban areas. This helps to re-valorize certain spaces, as Charles
Landry clearly puts it “cities are brands and they need glamour, style and fizz. That means
attractive commercial areas with brand-name stores and vibrant cultural, sports and commercial
events” (Landry, 2008:31). These creative subjects help to valorise certain urban areas, which is
the underlying aim of most of these discourses on creativity.
These discourses on creativity have helped to establish and standardize the regimes of self-
exploitation and precarity so characteristic of artists and cultural producers. Andrew Ross has
written how this process has helped to incorporate some of the productive regimes developed
by free software communities, as he clearly exposes “the cooperative labour ethos of the FLOSS
(Free/Libre Open Source Software) networks of engineers and programmers, has been lauded
as a noble model of mutual aid in the public service. But FLOSS has been much less useful as a
model for sustainable employment. Seduced by the prospect of utilizing unpaid, expert labour,
tech multinationals have increasingly adopted open source software like Linux, reinforcing
concerns that the ethical principle of free software for the people equals free labour for
corporations” (Ross, 2007:22). Possibly we could discuss some of Ross’s totalizing views, but
there is no question that the discourses on creativity are helping to capture those modes on
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production based on volunteer contributions, cooperation and symbolic retribution, even
though as Aiyer Ghosh (2006) has proven, the amount of employment generated by FLOSS is
undeniable.
This is exactly the point in which the social imperative to be more creative pushes workers to
choose a job which allows them to “develop” their creativity in detriment to more stable work
conditions or economic retributions. Rosalind Gill has analyzed how these notions of “coolness
and creativity” have contributed to shape the new media sector in the Netherlands (Gill 2002
and 2007). In her work, she shows how these concepts are directly related to the new forms of
exploitation and social discrimination that have emerged in this sector. Coolness helps to
overshadow more crude components of creative work: extreme flexibility and the absence of
securities or normalized work conditions. Gill’s work, based on a series of interviews and
encounters with software designers and developers shows that “one of the most striking
findings of this research is the extraordinary enthusiasm that web-workers have for their field.
Expressions of love and ardour were the norm” (Gill, 2007:13). One of the aspects that all
these workers value the most are the “opportunities it offered for autonomy and
entrepreneurship. Our respondents talked about the pleasure of being able to ‘create something
for yourself’” (Gill, 2007:13). Creativity as a source of fulfilment is flagged-up all along the
answers gathered in Gill’s research. When asked what are the qualities or aspects these workers
most appreciate in this sector there seemed to be a consensus on the fact that the interviewees
valued “its youth, dynamism, and creativity.” At the same time, and extremely related to all the
issues we have already discussed at the beginning of this chapter, these workers give extreme
importance to “the pleasures of working autonomously with no managerial control, flexible
working hours, and the intrinsically challenging and fulfilling nature of the work” (Gill, 2002:80).
So we can see how being able to develop one’s own creativity leads to this desired pleasure in
work. A powerful discourse comes into place: passion, devotion or sacrifices, made in the name
of work seem to be the price to pay in order to have a job that allows self-realization, creativity
and pleasure in work.
In an attempt to highlight some of the negative aspects and formulate a critique on the notion
of creativity, the British sociologist Thomas Osborne, in a paper that goes under the descriptive
name of ‘Against Creativity: a Philistine Rant”, sustains that we live “in an age in which
creativity is actually a kind of moral imperative” (Osborne, 2003:508). This author suggests that
the creativity explosion we are currently undergoing is “merely ideological: a response to the
needs of capitalism or more generally to the structural needs of the economy” (Osborne,
2003:508). Osborne believes that this obligation to become creative is determined by both a
specific form of governance in which a constellation of agencies, schemes and economic parties
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have come together to defend a specific notion of creativity that seems to suit the interests of
the economy in its current stage and by a hegemonic ideology. In this line he writes “to say that
the ethos of creativity simply answers to structural needs would be to ignore the fact that the
creativity explosion is also a product of human agency and the machinations of experts and -
loosely speaking - of workers of the intellect. It is, then, as much a matter of our
governmentality, as of ideology” (Osborne, 2003:508).
In another work, the British scholar Chris Bilton, proves creativity to be a political concept. In
his book Management and Creativity, after acknowledging that “creativity and the creative
industries have been oversold”(Bilton, 2007:xx), he goes on to show the links between the
endorsement of creativity by management and the neoliberal context in which it takes place.
Bilton challenges the notion of creativity that lies at the core of the definition of the creative
industries, and argues that “creative thinking is less likely to result from an individual ‘act of
genius’ than from a combination of different types of thinking” (Bilton, 2007:6). He later goes
on to look into the origins of this idea of creativity as a form of individual thought, making it
clear that there is a long genealogy underlying this assumption. As he puts it “the association of
creativity with the eccentric individualism can be traced back through a predominantly Western
philosophical tradition of art, stretching from Plato’s divine madness, through Romanticism and
Freudian psychoanalysis through to the Modernist notion of thinking out of the box. According
to this mythology, artists are exceptional individuals capable of extraordinary leaps of invention
which transcend rational analysis. Such moments of extraordinary invention have in turn taken
centre stage as the basis (or at least the starting point) of our contemporary creative industries
founded on ‘individual creativity, skill and talent’ ” (Bilton, 2007:14). Once this link is set, Bilton
establishes a new framework in which we should analyze creativity, as this notion of “creativity
is seen to be inherently unmanageable a creative economy is accordingly best achieved through
neo-liberal laissez-faire policies of deregulation and commercialization” (Bilton, 2007:15). In this
sense he makes it very clear that there is an explicit and political link between the promotion of
a notion of creativity based on individual talent, and an economic ideology, such as
neoliberalism, that believes in a society comprised of free individuals competing against each
other in their attempt to maximize profits.
The promotion of this notion of creativity has explicitly left out other notions of creativity
(those forms of creativity and knowledge that are produced through cooperation, the creativity
that stems from the commons) and has disembedded the individual from the system and social
networks which enable knowledge to be produced. This notion of creativity avoids taking into
account, peer production, commons based production, social forms of intelligence and focuses
only on the notion of individual talent. The promotion of this notion of creativity works in
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detriment to the networks that nurture creative agents, the systems of co-dependency and forms
of gift economy that shape the sphere. Echoing most of the ideas I have already put forward
during the first chapter of this work, Bilton rightly notes that “it is worth emphasizing that while
apparently rooted in individual skill, creative processes in the creative industries are essentially
collective” (Bilton, 2007:27). Summarizing Bilton’s arguments, we see how “the individualistic
model of creativity based on individual skill and originality is supported by neoliberal
assumptions about motivation and individual talent. The creative economy concept takes this
tendency a step further grafting the individualism of Western theories of creativity onto neo-
liberal market economics” (Bilton, 2007:164). So, we must be very cautious in the ways we use
and deploy the notion of creativity. If authors such as Landry, Florida or Barbrook, naturalize
the notion of creativity, we must always bear in mind the political connotations attached to the
concept.
Similarly it is interesting to see how creativity has been constructed and promoted by public
agencies, institutions and economic schemes, work done by the British scholar Angela
McRobbie who has devoted a great part of it to analyze what she has branded as “subcultural
entrepreneurship”. Looking into the documents and schemes that have been put forward by
those agencies in charge of promoting the creative industries, McRobbie argues that what we
can clearly see is that “the mission of government is to ‘free the creative potential of
individuals’”(McRobbie, 2003). And although McRobbie acknowledges the importance that
these documents and schemes have on the growth of the creative industries, she still shows
certain ambivalence, as she defends creativity as the asset that working class youth can exploit in
order to ascend socially. In this sense, she defends that there are two different waves of creative
entrepreneurs: the original wave comprised of subcultural youths that tapped into their
creativity in order to build economic models to help them escape from their class and a second
generation of entrepreneurs influenced by policy and promotional schemes. As she argues,
there was a “first wave of self-generated sub-cultural entrepreneurs who were to be found
busily inventing styles, sewing in their own kitchens and then selling what they made at weekend
street-markets provided what we would now call incubators for experimenting in creative self-
employment” (McRobbie, 2007), who didn’t receive any institutional support or recognition.
McRobbie suggests that it was this first generation of creative entrepreneurs who helped to
inspire and shape the promotional schemes later developed by the government. Paradoxically
the types of business and entrepreneurial activities that contributed and inspired the later plans
worked on a hard reality, as McRobbie argues “this burst of colourful activity had success at the
level of press and media attention but was financially unsustainable leading to bankruptcy and
debt” (McRobbie, 2007). So we see that the model on which a great part of the policies and
schemes aimed at promoting the emergence of the creative industries was an economic failure.
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Still, the ethos that shaped this first generation of ‘subcultural entrepreneurs’ and the notions of
creativity they helped to articulate trickled down and found their place in the policies later
developed by the DCMS.
Angela McRobbie argues that the discourses that have creativity at their centre are very
powerful, in order to mobilize people and trigger certain desires, especially “creative work is
particularly appealing to youth, because of the emphasis on uncovering talent, because of their
proximity to the kinds of fields flagged up as already successful, i.e. popular music, film, art,
writing, acting, fashion, graphic design and so on” (McRobbie, 2003), so we see how creativity is
deployed strategically in order to promote self-employment and self-accountability. One must
rely on these assets in order to get a job or find a sustainable economic model. This way
creativity becomes intertwined with discourses based on personal success, self-realization, self-
accountability and employability. McRobbie argues that later generations of “cultural
entrepreneurs” combined the need and desire to be creative, displayed by the “first wave of
subcultural entrepreneurs”, with a clear notion of individual success which was crafted and
enhanced by the media. So we see that there is a social production of creativity enhanced by the
media and combined with political plans and schemes aimed at getting people to act and think
creatively. This production of individual creative subjects suits neoliberal assumptions of
individuality and social disembeddedness and operates at two levels: it aims at making people
self-employed, tackling in this way unemployment figures, at the same time that it establishes the
subjective conditions that will enable workers to endure the precarity that defines the creative
sector.
Happiness
Another powerful discourse that has emerged in the realm of work has the notion of happiness
at its centre. Workers should be happy in their workplaces and a large industry has been created
to ensure that this occurs. Office-spaces have been redesigned in order to allow this happiness
to happen and been filled with toys, colours and posters with slogans reminding workers how
happy they are. Self-sacrifice is easier to endure if you are smiling. Along the following lines I
am going to see how this notion of happiness has been deployed in the corporate world, in
Silicon Valley and has also found a place in the creative industries. Again, with the help of
Berardi, I will try to locate the appearance of this notion in the social movements that shocked
the world during the seventies.
As the Italian author argues during the seventies one of the leading demands in all of these
social movements was the right to happiness, the right to introduce playfulness and fun into the
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factory’s workspaces. As he notes “in the pages of A/traverso46, one central concept was
repeated in a thousand ways: Collective happiness is subversion, subversion is collective
happiness”(Berardi, 2010:20). As Berardi argues, this happiness was conceptualized in two
different ways: on the one hand there was a desire to escape the gloom and sadness that defined
the work in the factories, on the other hand, there was a political need to reinstate a collective
feeling of happiness as a form to differentiate themselves from traditional political discourses.
On this line, one slogan played repeatedly on Radio Alice was “Communism is free and happy:
ten hundred thousand Radio Alices”(Berardi, 2010: 21).
So we see how in the decades of the sixties and seventies, when the Fordist industrial model
reached its peak, workers started to refuse the constraints it imposed and started to seek new
forms of subjectivity. The alienation from work helped to give rise to this drive for happiness. It
is in this context that a new set of ideologies and ideas around labour emerged which “had as a
central political aim the conquest of a new social condition in which work and self-realization
were the same thing” (Berardi, 2003:51). Labour should not alienate workers any longer, new
“humane” forms of work were to be explored in which different values were taken into
account. In this context, happiness became a central demand - work could and should be fun.
Work could no longer alienate human feeling and emotions, it could no longer be a dull and
repetitive activity that transformed the worker into a piece of machinery. Paradoxically, as
Berardi notes, there is a contemporary “public discourse based on the idea of happiness which
is not only possible but almost compulsory” (Berardi, 2003:48). One has to follow certain rules
and certain protocols that will make him happy, must follow certain models of behaviour. As
the geographer Nigel Thrift (2005), or the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich (2009) have noted,
there is currently an industry set around discovering and releasing the playful and emotional self
that has found a perfect place to grow in the technological firms that have taken over Silicon
Valley. The “happiness” ideology has found a perfect ally in New Age “philosophies” and all
those techniques that have been developed to find the inner self. Berardi notes that “at the
centre of the new economy, understood both as a productive model and a cultural discourse, we
can find a promise of individual happiness, success and an expansion of the knowledge and
experiential horizons” (2003:10). This discourse has had an enormous impact on defining the
imaginary of contemporary labour. The quirky Google office spaces have become synonymous
of a new form of capitalism that can not only be productive but also fun and fulfilling.
46A/traverso was an Italian underground magazine that was started in 1976. Most of its members,
related to the student protests, were also involved in Radio Alice.
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/traverso (Last Accessed January 2012).
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Nigel Thrift in his book Knowing Capitalism admits that now “for quite a few people, capitalism is
not just hard graft. It is also fun. People get stuff from it – and not just more commodities.
Capitalism has a kind of crazy vitality” (Thrift, 2005:1). In Thrift’s views, this new form of
capitalism is infused by several circuits that operate simultaneously and help to shape and
promote this model of capitalism. This occurs thanks to what he calls the ‘cultural circuit of
capitalism’ that is “business schools, management consultants, management gurus and the
media” (Thrift, 2005:6), that have become aligned to design, teach and promote this new form
of ‘soft capitalism’, in which self-development and fun are constitutive elements. Thrift
considers that organizations have changed significantly since the 1960s and have now become
knowledgeable and reflexive entities. In that sense, they are redefining their culture and image it
is in this transformation that workers have got caught up. Now these have to re-think
themselves as knowledgeable, flexible, entrepreneurial and creative agents.
Thrift argues that the ‘cultural circuit’ of capitalism has helped to design and shape new
corporations; before “we talked of structures and their systems, of inputs and outputs, of
control devices and of managing them, as if the whole was one huge factory. Today the
language is not that of engineering but of politics, with talk of cultures and networks of teams
and coalitions, of influences and power rather than of control, of leadership not management.
It is as if we had suddenly woken up to the fact that organisations were made up of people after
all, not just ‘heads’ or ‘role occupations’ ” (Thrift, 2005:33). A new metaphoric language has
been created and been distributed through management books, CDs and DVDs, in which
corporations are defined as organic elements, as smart elements that need to be managed, not
ruled. New looser organizational forms are constantly promoted, and the figure of the manager
has become central to this new paradigm. The manager has to be able to create a nice working
environment (by substituting walls and rooms with open spaces), has to be able to build nice
working atmospheres (with the introduction of toys and games), and has to make sure workers
are able to adapt and self-regulate themselves in this soft environment. It is in this context that
workers need to become happier and learn to become self-motivated, seeking fulfilment in their
work.
Reflecting on this reality, and helped by the work developed by Paul Du Gay (1996), Thrift
points out that work has been reorganized, as “part of that continuum along which ‘we’ all seek
to realize ourselves as particular sets of person-outcomes, self-regulatory, self-fulfilling
individual actors – ‘enterprise’ seeks to ‘re-enchant’ organized work by restoring to it that which
bureaucracy is held to have crassly repressed: emotion, personal responsibility, the possibility of
pleasure, etc.” (Thrift, 2005: 34). This process has occurred with the help of a whole new breed
of techniques aimed at unlocking “the spiritual self ” and those emotional aspects of the human
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being that were refused their entry in the factories of Fordism. A new breed of ‘spiritual
directors’ or ‘engineers of the human soul’ were introduced to help managers extract those
more subtle aspects of their workforce. Oriental techniques are combined with druid
ceremonies or American Indian mythologies in order to help this new generation of workers to
fulfil their realizations and find their true selves. At the same time high-tech organizations were
equipped with “meditation rooms” in which one could practice yoga, relax or “channel one´s
creative energies”. As Thrift has noted, New Age has an important role to play in this new breed
of soft capitalism, as he argues that “both business and New Age are united in their
commitment to technologies of the self, from the cultural circuit’s vision of an entrepreneurial
self who makes the corporation healthy, wealthy and wise to the New Age network’s cultivation
of self-spirituality” (Thrift, 2005:65). We must bear in mind that the growth of all these
techniques and strategies to find pleasure in work, and that rely on the figure of the happy
workers, have run in parallel to the processes of massive downsizing that affected corporate
America, so it is interesting to see to what extent the growth of an industry that focuses on
liberating happiness is related to this reality. The journalist and social commentator Barbara
Ehrenreich, explores some of the negative aspects and problems derived from the introduction
of positive thinking in the contemporary workspace in her book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless
Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (Ehrenreich, 2009). As previously
acknowledged by Thrift, she notes the importance of all those industries devoted to promoting
positive thinking to all those managers willing to introduce happiness in the workspace. and how
a new industry has emerged to cater with books, films, posters and other products. At the same
time, we see the appearance of “tens of thousands of “life coaches”, “executive coaches,” and
motivational speakers and a growing cadre of professional psychologists who seek to train
them” (Ehrenreich, 2009:9).
Ehrenreich denounces how “America’s white-collar workforce accepted positive thinking as a
substitute for their former affluence and security” (Ehrenreich, 2009:122), as most of these
measures to make workers happier coincided with layoffs, redundancies and the extreme
flexibilization and casualization of labour conditions in the corporations. Positive thinking also
helped many of these corporations to avoid responsibilities over the individual life of all those
workers who were made redundant, as Ehrenreich writes, “the flip side of positivity is thus a
harsh insistence on personal responsibility: if your business fails or your job is eliminated, it
must be because you didn’t try hard enough, didn’t believe firmly enough in the inevitability of
your success” (2009:8). Ehrenreich relates this development of positive thinking and the
imposition of happiness as the right emotional state in the contemporary workplace with the
Calvinist tradition that has been prevalent in the history of the Unites States. In this sense, she
makes a clearly Foucauldian reflection when she writes that “the most striking continuity
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between the old religion and the new positive thinking lies in their common insistence on work -
the constant internal work of self-monitoring” (Ehrenreich, 2009:90). The extension of these
technologies of the self imply not only the imposition of certain discourses but a constant work
of self-examination and internalization of the gaze of the other.
Authenticity
The last category I want to explore is the notion of authenticity, that is, the movement to let
workers express their real inner self in the workplace. To do so, workers are prompted to display
their sexual preferences, show their tattoos or wear their favourite T-shirts to work. The
professor of Organization Theory at Queen Mary’s, Peter Fleming has worked on this subject
and provided one of the most poignant interpretations of it. As he writes “personal authenticity
is encouraged by way of promoting those aspects of self that are more associative of the
private or non-work realm (…) signs of leisure, sexuality, ethnicity, alternative lifestyles, and
consumption patterns are now welcomed into the sphere of production” (Fleming, 2009:7).
This reality can be read as a movement towards freedom, as a way of liberating the authentic
subjectivity of the worker in the workspace, but Fleming argues that this strategy hides a new
“articulation of domination” (Fleming, 2009:10). It constitutes a way of capturing externalities
produced by the very body of the worker, Fleming argues that it helps the companies to
introduce, as productive elements, all those aspects of the worker that were traditionally
associated with leisure time, with intimacy, with no work.
Playfulness and games are promoted in the authentic workspace in order to facilitate the
emergence of real selves, they provide a way to liberate the worker from the ‘iron cage’ and
introduce his or her ‘real’ subjectivity into the workspace. These new firms, instead of
promoting anonymity, conformity and homogeneity, celebrate difference. As Fleming argues
“there is also an emphasis on celebrating different lifestyles, especially with reference to
alternative ad modish punk attitudes. This is why organizations, especially in the creative
industries such as IT and advertising, allow employees to wear informal clothing and display
visible tattoos and piercings” (Fleming, 2009:22). This difference is transformed into an asset for
the enterprise that can brand itself as a cool and funky place in which to work in and to work
with. Workers feel they are part of an interesting project that allows them to be real, to be
authentic; this compensates other inconveniences such as low wages, working for long hours or
extreme flexibility. By promoting authenticity “the whole person is included in the regime of the
labour process” (2009:37), there is a real capture of all those aspects of the workers that he or
she would have never brought to work. The celebration of authenticity constitutes a dispositive
to capture life and as such it transforms life into a productive element. Analyzing contemporary
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management and reflecting on the focus on authenticity, Chris Bilton argues that “by removing
constraints and by letting workers express their own individual ideas, managers believe they will
improve performance. Management has thus become a form of non-management or laissez-
faire” (Bilton, 2007:67). Authenticity constitutes a form of laissez-faire introduced into the
factory. In this sense, Bilton traces a direct line between liberalism and the notions of freedom
introduced into the workplace, “the freedom offered to the majority of those working in the
creative industries is double-edged. Workers and creators are ‘empowered’ to make their own
decisions and take responsibility for their own actions. The comfortable hierarchy of permanent
employment, promotion and patronage has been replaced by the scramble of the freelance
economy, the democracy of the market. What is presented initially as freedom, flexibility and
autonomy actually becomes a form of alienation” (Bilton, 2007:84). Andrew Ross also links the
emergence of new systems of control to the supposed freedom to exhibit the “true self” in the
workspace. At times he himself appears to be mesmerized by the looks and attitudes displayed
by some of the workers at Razorfish, one of the new media enterprises, he studies, that contrast
with the digital systems introduced by the firm to control the time they spend web-browsing,
prototyping or writing software. The apparent freedom to display their identities is accompanied
by soft-control measures aimed at optimizing productivity. At the same time he describes a very
interesting process, parallel to the emergence of these highly individualized workers he notices
the fracture of group identities.
At this point I consider worth introducing a very interesting point developed by Fleming and
that helps us to understand the notion of authenticity under the framework developed in the
first chapter of this work. When I introduced the notion of cognitive capitalism, I described a
process of capture of the different forms of knowledge and ideas that circulate and emanate
from the social sphere. In the third chapter, I discussed the notion of contemporary commons,
that is, the sources of knowledge and collective innovation from which the creative industries
pool in order to maintain the constant production of difference. In a way, the introduction of
authenticity into the workspace could be understood as an apparatus, designed to enable the
capture of some of the productive aspects of the workers that were traditionally excluded from
the production line. In this sense, Fleming argues that “we must think of the private and non-
work themes - lifestyle, fun, sexuality, and so forth - as part of the commons that resides both
inside the informal networks of the firm and outside the productive sphere” (Fleming, 2009:50);
that is, authenticity, fun and creativity are just components of a larger apparatus of capture of
the wealth that characterizes the immaterial commons. If this was the case, we should consider
under this prism all these non-centralized forms of cultural production that are taking place, and
are pooling ideas and knowledge to form intangible networks, to further understand how these
processes of extraction of ideas from the commons are taking place.
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Conclusions
Both lines of argument, either the post-autonomist or the Foucauldian, describe a process of
individuation that locates a detached subject at the centre of his or her quest for pleasure and
wellbeing. The discourses that promote entrepreneurship capture these flows of desire and
transform them into subjective dispositions and achievable aims. These new figures must break
with other forms of collective identification (unions, guilds, families, communities) in order to
pursue their quest for personal gratification and happiness. Individuality and freedom
characterize the neoliberal entrepreneur that needs to rely solely on him or herself in order to
achieve their goals. One must design his or her own life, following intimate and private
gratifications, such as pleasure, coolness or creativity.
Remembering the discussion posed in chapter one, the cultural entrepreneur is a virtuoso that
follows a very specific score: the quest for authenticity and creativity. The entrepreneur becomes
disembedded from the communities in which he has gathered and produced his knowledge, and
sourced his social capital. He is the opportunist that seeks to transform common ideas into
private assets. He is the cynical element that brands and claims authorship of the sounds, styles
or ideas that have been forged collectively. So we can see that the search for freedom and
autonomy comes at a cost: the explicit rejection of those social networks and communities in
which one started operating. This is the real process of singularization that underlies
entrepreneurship. Opportunism means one has to be ready to jump in at any moment into the
next niche market, follow the next trend or patent the next idea. It implies being able to discern
what forms of common knowledge can be valorized and introduced into the market. Being
creative implies being able to put your name on flows of ideas that you have never owned.
Precarity has exacerbated this process. More and more cultural workers are willing to become
entrepreneurs in order to find sustainable ways to conduct their practice. As we have seen in the
previous chapter, working conditions don’t change that much but the pleasure of working on
what one likes seems to compensate. Meanwhile, traditional traits that characterized Fordist
workers, such as solidarity or comradeship, are now replaced by egoism and coolness. Collective
goals have been transformed into personal happiness. These are negative aspects that never
appear in the discourses that promote entrepreneurship - the dark side that will never appear in
glossy leaflets and animated power points. Still, we can also find bifurcations and alterations to
the models proposed by these schemes. In the following chapter I will analyze alternative
models of collective work and non-parasitic relations with the cultural commons. Through
looking into a case study I will examine an alternative to the singularized subjectivities and
individual search for pleasure, present in the hegemonic discourses.
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Chapter Six.
Creative Basins, the Commons and
Unstable Infrastructures
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Technologies are unstable things. We think
we know what a radio is or what a cinema
is used for, but these phenomena, which we
take for granted, have often surprising
histories
Brian Larkin
The previous chapters have established that both the cultural policy frameworks designed to
promote the expansion of the creative industries and the proliferation of the figure of the
cultural entrepreneur, as well as the subjective mechanisms set up to generate frameworks of
reference for the workers in the field, have favoured the creation of very specific models of
cultural enterprise determined by a persistent individualisation of workers and the ruthless
extraction of knowledge and ideas from the cultural commons. Despite the fact that in the third
chapter I introduced the notion of the commons as a basic productive resource which sustains
cognitive capitalism and the creative industries more specifically, in this chapter I am going to
introduce various ways of exploiting this commons in order to discern different models of
production capable of breaking with certain tyrannies implicit in the established models. At the
same time I aim to propose new frames of reference for thinking about the different forms of
the economisation of culture. It is not my intention to present these bifurcations of the model as
alternatives to the prevailing system, but rather as possible means of production of culture
emerging from below, that operate given place to complex ecosystems and different relations of
equilibrium to the commons.
In order to do this, I first need to introduce a concept that will help us think about how to
conceive of a cultural economy without the need to perpetuate the ways and models examined
in the previous chapters. In addition, it can also offer new possibilities and ways of articulating
the economy-culture relationship. I will firstly define the notion of unstable infrastructures,
based on Brian Larkin’s ideas. These are channels of production, distribution and promotion of
culture, which present emerging qualities. I will demonstrate that these infrastructures, far from
being stable and reproducible systems, are in fact contingent elements originating from
networks of trust, reciprocity and exchange. Even though, they remain highly effective and
constitute very powerful productive mechanisms that enable the production, distribution and
promotion of cultural artefacts. I will also argue that if the notion of informal economy can be
an interesting tool to describe these kinds of heterogeneous economic systems, I believe that
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there are some interesting differences in the example I will introduce that help us to think more
in terms of a commons-based economy and not in terms of in-formality.
My aim in this chapter is to examine the models of production of culture which emerge as
bifurcations and diverge from the criteria established by the institutions promoting
entrepreneurship; this will help us to ascertain which specific types of business models could be
developed as an alternative to the canonical models previously analysed. To this end I will
present a case study, Traficantes de Sueños, a publishing project based in Madrid which emerged as
a response to the different needs presented by social movements. By exploring the concept of
creative basins suggested by a group of post-autonomist thinkers, I will attempt to draft a
complex ecosystem in which cultural production introduces itself and extracts value from
political, social and cultural processes. The infrastructures that result from the emerging
processes will thence establish links between the cultural commons and the different agents who
exploit it.
Denormativisation
Not all of the cultural agents who have been mentored, trained or helped by the agencies
promoting entrepreneurship, are comfortable with the model that is being pushed forward. The
canonical model of cultural entrepreneur comprises a normativisation of economic practices
which faces significant obstacles and disagreements. Not all the cultural agents feel comfortable
or adequately represented by the type of cultural entrepreneur being championed. One of the
facts that I have found the most revealing from interviewing cultural workers, is that a large part
of those interviewed have a very different notion of the figure of the entrepreneur from the one
defined in entrepreneurship manuals. The most obvious difference is that, whilst according to
the canonical discourse the entrepreneur is solely an economic figure, whose main objective is to
generate profits (economically speaking), empirical research establishes that, in the cultural field,
as we have seen in chapter four, entrepreneurship is largely linked to fulfilling a satisfying
personal project. This production of pleasure in work that we have discussed in previous
chapters becomes entrenched in the more traditional depictions of entrepreneurship giving rise
to this self-motivated and satisfied cultural entrepreneur. Above all else, many of those small
and medium enterprises I interviewed aim to be able to continue developing their project. Given
that we have already discussed the significance of pleasure in work in this field, it is necessary at
this point to look at that which lies beyond these selfish forms of personal satisfaction.
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It is thus interesting to consider the fact that a number of working dynamics that were born out
of and fostered by a neoliberal economic context later acquire the potential, once they are
applied to the field of cultural production, to revert the logic that created them. The different
bifurcations of the canonical model emerge in opposition to the normative model which has
been imposed from above. The substitution of economic objectives for values of a different
nature, the introduction of systems of cooperation instead of competition, and even the creation
of businesses as forms of political action rather than spaces for the generation of wealth, are all
signs pointing to certain forms of subversion of entrepreneurship. Gradually and slowly,
pleasure in work translates into an awareness of the necessity to defend and improve the cultural
commons.
These forms of cooperation can bring about, and indeed we will see that they do, new work
models where the concept of enterprise is replaced by the notion of community. Out of this
situation emerge very different forms of work. Some of these, most obviously, are related to the
ease with which cultural enterprises have entered the field of the so-called “social economy”. It
is precisely in their interest to move away from the more individualised and selfish forms of
work which define some of the practices of the field, that these enterprises have started to work
with institutions not of the cultural field, such as departments of social services, education and
even health services (as we saw in chapter two). At the same time, organisations located within
the field of the social economy have started to develop activities of a cultural nature (I am
hereby referring to the development of drawing and painting workshops, hip-hop, stage and
other similar programmes), which seems to demonstrate that the models of work suggested by
many NGOs have a possible outlet of application within the field of cultural production. We
must not forget that this is happening in a context of privatization of the welfare system and is
aligned with the imperatives and measures put forward by neoliberal governments in order to
reduce the size and power of the State.
We must note that this type of enterprises are miles away from the cultural entrepreneurs that
illustrated the glossy magazines covers raving about “cool Britannia”, and have likewise little to
do with the celebrity culture endorsed by the US entertainment industry (Marshall, 2006). Quite
the contrary, these cultural entrepreneurs are well aware of the difficulty in leaving the slim
margin of sustainability behind and achieving any sort of media notoriety. Their interests,
nevertheless, lie elsewhere. Some of the concerns emerging from these discourses resonate in
what in the corporate world is known as “the triple bottom line”, a concept coined by the
British author John Elkington in his classic Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st
Century Business (Elkington, 1997). Elkington held that corporations’ profit and loss statements
should include a triple balance that computed economic, social and environmental interests.
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Elkington’s work has been very influential in shaping discourses about corporate social
responsibility and sustainability, two notions at the forefront of many business conferences
today. Moreover, he established what has come to be known as the three corporate pillars:
people, planet and profit. Another text worth highlighting, published in the same year, is signed
by Charles Leadbeater: The Rise of the Social Entrepreneur (Leadbeater, 1997). In this article
Leadbeater introduced a new economic sector emerging out of “the intersection of three social
dynamics”: the public sector, the private sector and the third sector, known as social
entrepreneurship. In his views, social entrepreneurs are people who have decided to resolve
social problems and inequalities by way of business-based projects: they constitute a kind of
hybrid between NGOs and traditional business companies. Closely following the social-
democratic discourse of the New Labour party, the notion of social entrepreneurship is one
further example of the neoliberal transfer of state competencies to the private sector. We can
certainly draw a parallel between these ideas and some of the concerns of certain cultural
enterprises. Nevertheless, as we have been able to ascertain, some of these enterprises are
redefining their business model due to ideological motives. Yet, whereas these enterprises are
clearly poles apart from certain premises and modes of operation characteristic of the creative
industries, they still have not been capable of, or have not been interested in, thinking
themselves within a commons regime. For this we have to continue looking at other models.
In order to understand this new reality, we have to focus our attention on the genealogy of the
creative industries itself. As we know, their model of production in based on the search and
capture of differences (ideas, languages, codes, melodies, forms of sociability etc.); that is, in
what was once defined as cultural commons, which can be captured in order to be later
introduced into the market in the form of cultural goods. Some of the enterprises examined
reject this model in as much as it is considered dangerous for the cultural and social ground on
which they feed. From this perspective, the emphasis shifts from the individual creators to the
social networks that allow for creative activities: these are the so-called “creative basins”, which
were introduced in the second chapter. This concept has inspired a new generation of
enterprises who have rethought not only their model of production but, furthermore, the ways
in which they relate to the communities and the context within which they operate.
Creative Basins
A group of Italian and French thinkers related to the Multitudes Journal 47, writing in the mid
nineties, started to define a series of changes that were taking part in the production systems. As
47 http://multitudes.samizdat.net/ (Last Accessed May 2011).
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we discussed in the first chapter, the traditional factories, the locus of all autonomous
antagonism, stopped being a central element in the productive lines48 in post-Fordist economies.
In this sense they argue that we have seen the mutation of the factories into social factories 49,
dispersed but organized sites of production that take imply social relations, forms of
communication and cooperation. These social factories imply a non-linear articulation of
heterogeneous elements (emotions, capital, ideas, struggles, knowledge) that can be taking place
simultaneously in any part of a city. The role of cognitive capitalism is to valorise and capture
these flows and articulate them in such a way that they can produce innovation.
These new configurations go way beyond the factory walls and breed on a heterogeneous
conglomerate of subjects that inhabit the city and that have the potential to generate
inventions50 through communicative processes. These authors branded these spontaneous
spaces for cooperation and realization of collective potential as “creative basins”. The first
references to the concept are found in Le bassin de travail inmatériel dans la métropole parisienne of
1996, by Antonella Corsani, Maurizio Lazzarato and Antonio Negri. In this paper they use for
the first time the notion of “basins of cooperation of immaterial labour”. This definition looks
to emphasize the fact that both factories and businesses have been superseded by forms of
knowledge and creativity that reach beyond their limits. Basins of cooperation are hereby
introduced as spaces that go beyond the notion of centres of creative research that R&D
departments represent.
This has been thoroughly argued in Emmanuel Rodríguez’s “Wealth and the City”:
“A great part of the work cycle that made up these businesses’ effective production was not
taking place in their premises, nor in those of the businesses contracted out. It depended on an
imprecise space intersected by training circuits (both public and private, formal and informal),
cultural tendencies and networks, as well as lifestyles. These spaces were called basins of
immaterial labour (...) a vast plurality of agents, qualifications and knowledges that went well
beyond the firm’s perimeter” (Rodriguez, 2007: 198).
The economist Antonella Corsani has underscored the limitations of the factory and the Fordist
space, and the ways in which this is superseded by a form of creativity that goes beyond its
limited confines. She describes this as “the explosion of the factory, the distribution of new
48 Enzo Rullani uses the French term ‘filière’, which implies a much more loose process, the rigidity of
production lines becomes flexibilized in the filière productive. See Rullani, 2007.
49 This is derived from the work of the Italian autonomist thinker Mario Tronti.
50 I want to make a clear distinction here between inventions and innovation. Following Gabriel Tarde
(1890), inventions are those ideas, insights or possibilities that haven’t hit the market, whilst innovation
implies the valorization and marketization of these inventions. In this sense we could argue that an
innovation is an actualized invention.
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forms of cooperation within the interstices created by Fordist business, and, in short, the fact
that innovation escapes the control of big business” (Corsani, 2004: 91). We can hereby discern
that social cooperation is not just an anecdotal or marginal phenomenon, but rather, that it lies
right at the centre of a series of economic and social transformations that are about to take place
on a global scale. Only when the latter has been realised, can the process, by which subjective
production and commons based creativity become the centre of the process of production, be
understood. This is brilliantly expounded in the following passage, in which Corsani presents
the ways in which this transformation will affect subjective processes: “if during industrial
capitalism subjectivity was to be left behind in the factory’s lockers, in contemporary capitalism
(...) it must be put to work. The passage from an economy in which invention/innovation was
the exception, to one in which invention/innovation is the norm, entails a passage from
spatialised time to the time of becoming.” (Corsani, 2007: 48).
It is hereby clear that a process of economic transformation will be instanced which for its
realisation will require modifications in the subjective disposition of all citizens. These will have
to forget the Fordist fragmentations and separations we have already discussed in chapter one of
this same work: production/creativity, duty/pleasure, or work/leisure in order to feel fully
creative and part of a larger process, in which the confluence of different subjectivities will be
measured as wealth, a wealth with a social impact. Within this configuration, cities have an
important role to play as they are considered the perfect spaces for these processes to take place.
It is indeed in urban spaces, with their multiple intersections of agents, their economic flows and
multiplicity of knowledges51, where the potential of these creative basins are finally realised.
These basins complement other economic and cultural dynamics which previously existed in the
city. Depending on the type of relationship that the former establishes with the latter, they can
benefit from the latter’s unquestionable potential. Rodríguez points out that “alongside the great
macroeconomic magnitudes there is a proliferating sphere of symbiotic relations, which can and
must be understood as the social underground of wealth tout court” (Rodríguez, 2007: 190), that
is to say, these creative flows can be understood as a source of value, or wealth, that is added to
and sometimes promotes the forms of economic value already present in urban centres.
However, for the first time, “cultural wealth, the production of knowledge and innovation in a
broad sense, surpass the field of public and private R&D institutes. This proliferation of
cognitive production (...) takes place within a complex space that traverses formal institutions
and businesses” (Rodríguez, 2007: 203). We can therefore conceive of this commons based
creativity as a whole that exceeds existing institutions and categories, but which nevertheless has
the capacity and the potential to be linked to all of them, such that it becomes a new resource
51 Note the Italian distinction between sapere and conoscenza, which cannot be translated into English.
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that can be implemented or exploited as long as forms of appraising and segmenting this
immanent whole are established. In order to understand this new reality, the social must be
understood not as a macro-element but as a proliferation of relations at different levels, whose
complementarity supports the generation of these processes of immaterial collaboration.
Depending on the ways that access to these basins is negotiated, new labour paradigms,
completely different from previously existing ones, will emerge.
To sum up: creative basins take shape in cities and urban centres and comprise a multitude of
subjects, ideas, knowledges, forms of communication, sociability and values. These basins have a
creative potential that exceeds the limits of factories and businesses, and they therefore become
a new resource. One of the most notable features of these creative basins, which paradoxically
can also constitute a source of vulnerability, is their openness. Basins are not closed
environments or confined areas; these basins expand and adapt to social formations, special
configurations and adapt to economic, social and cultural flows. As opposed to the notion of
industrial district put forward by Marshall, which implied clusters of horizontally and vertically
integrated firms, these basins are never defined or formalized as such. This openness implies
that anybody can contribute but also tap into these basins and source information, ideas or
inventions from them. If Neeson (1996) has argued that one of the main characteristics that
define the commons is their openness, without doubt we could argue that the basins are open
by definition. Forms of organization and elements designed to extract value from the basins are
built upon them, but in no case there is a complete overlap between the basins and the models
that are generated to benefit from them. Hence, they must be understood as a new form of
labour, and their economic potential must also be analysed and correctly evaluated. The main
aim of the private sector, institutions and universities, in relation to this latent wealth, is to
appropriate it by generating various channels for accessing it and by regulating it with intellectual
property laws. But, despite their capture by the above mentioned organisms, these creative
basins are still to be regarded as a form of social wealth that can benefit the whole of society.
And lastly, it is precisely the moment at which this creative potential enters the market and is
transformed into economic value that we can term innovation.
In what follows I will analyse a case study which I consider to have taken this concern to a
much more complex level, managing to develop a model of production very different from the
canons dominating the field. I am referring to Traficantes de Sueños, a publishing and distribution
project, which also runs a bookshop. Based in the neighbourhood of Lavapiés, at the very centre
of Madrid, they have translated and published books by authors such as Silvia Federici, Richard
Stallman, Maurizio Lazaratto, Paolo Virno, Precarias a la Deriva, Montserrat Galcerán, and
Lawrence Lessig, among many others.
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Traficantes de Sueños
This project was born in the form of a collective fifteen years ago, in response to many of the
debates and transformations to do with social movements taking place in Spain during the
1990s. The three original founding members understood that at the time social movements
needed to introduce new forms of knowledge and interpretation that would help them
understand some of the changes that were taking place. Given the global crisis affecting activist
organisations at large and, more particularly, the crisis that in Spain put the role of squatted
spaces in question, it was clear that new tools were needed to help redefine the identity of social
movements. Up until that moment, these had refused the possibility of conceiving their
productivity in economic terms, so much so that discussions about money and forms of
valorising their work were basically banned. Debates about the effectiveness of political actions
completely eclipsed and prevailed over all other matters.
Traficantes de Sueños was founded with one single tangible asset, a folding table that was taken to
meetings, demonstrations, squatted spaces and events, and on which certain books, which were
thought to be able to help rethink and create self-training circuits within activist networks, were
put on sale; but it also held and tapped into the knowledge of previous generations of activists
and militant researchers. Today, Traficantes de Sueño has ten employees on the payroll, spacious
premises, a bookshop, a publishing and distribution house, and a design workshop. Their aims
are the same that they started with, yet the new situation has provided the project with an
infrastructure for the production and circulation of knowledge that bears no comparison to any
other similar organisation. I first came in contact with TdS when, in 2004, I was asked to
collaborate with them in the translation of a book. Thereafter we had contact on a more casual
basis, up until two years ago, when I started collaborating with them more directly in various
activities. In the past two years I have thus been able to carefully follow their work methods and
conversations, and I have participated in many of the activities that they promote. The analysis
that follows includes various extracts from interviews, conversations, and field book notes that I
have been gathering over the past three years. My focus will thus not lie so much on the
achievements of the project as on the debates and ways of thinking the relationship of this type
of initiative to the commons, which have managed to lead to the present work model. The
bookshop, the social space and the offices of TdS constitute today a hotbed of initiatives,
providing physical and intellectual space for numerous debates and presentations. Yet this has
not always been like this; the members of this project have travelled a long road to get to where
they are today.
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During an interview with one of the members of TdS, Pablo “Panzer”, he explained how, once
they realised what their niche was and the needs of localised knowledge production for the
social movements, the project underwent different incarnations and models, until they arrived at
the one we know today. I do not hereby intend to embark on a comprehensive analysis of all the
forms and models that this project has taken and followed; nevertheless I will focus on the steps
that have led this organisation to consider itself a business and self-employment model. One
such benchmark took place when, for various reasons, TdS had to move out of the premises
they initially occupied and find a new space. “At that moment, we were confronted with having
to think about the more business orientated aspect of this project, since we were considering the
possibility of renting our own space, in order to have a shop open to the public and work
offices to be able to continue with our work”. This decision implied escalating the whole project
and find new channels of sustainability, given that rent for such a space was a considerable fixed
monthly expense and thus implied a continuity in terms of production and of certain
commitments, which up until that point, had not been part of the project in such an obvious
way. The decision to rent the premises out of which they operate today, which was absolutely
not an easy decision, could have led to changes not only in terms of the scale of the project, but
also in terms of the founding principles and decision making processes of the project, but, as we
will see in brief, this has not been completely the case.
The decision making process at TdS takes place in the form of assembly discussions, something
which they have inherited from the different social and political movements its members came
out of. All the important decisions are debated amongst all members of the collective until a
consensus is reached. As a result, some of the strictly operative decisions suffer some delays
(there is one weekly assembly during which specific decisions are discussed and validated), yet at
the same time, this allows for certain issues to be carefully examined before any decision is
made. This decision making model clashes with the management models taught and
implemented in the cultural enterprise incubators, where autonomous decision making is
promoted, as well as the individualisation of work by designating competencies. Despite the fact
that this assembly-based decision making process might at first seem unproductive, which at a
certain level it probably is, it has allowed for the whole group to assimilate the different changes
that have taken place, as well as the more important decisions that have been made, in
comfortable time periods. For instance, another member of the collective, Bea, admits that the
question of the business nature of TdS is not yet fully resolved, but nevertheless, she says that
they have opted to explore the notion of “political entrepreneurship”, that is to say, to think the
enterprise as an element whose function it is “to transform the social and political common into
an economic element, in order to dynamise processes of transformation”. They thus manage to
maintain the group’s cohesion and by preventing those most critical of the business process
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from feeling pushed into a process they distrust, certain economic experiments can take place
within the project. This decision making process has led TdS through unexpected areas, thus
allowing for a certain experimentation with the business form, which would not have been
possible had those processes been different.
Recalling this new idea, the “political enterprise” constitutes, if not an aberration, at the very
least an extremely novel productive element in the field of the creative industries, as far as the
constellation of business models is concerned. This is due to the fact that its model of
production is based on the capability to valorise certain political and social elements and make
them productive, in order to reap profit from them. This, in turn, makes the project sustainable,
and, more importantly, provides channels of sustainability for the social movements themselves.
This type of enterprise creates value out of political tension, activist communities and processes
of social articulation, yet at the same time it becomes an integral element of these, returning
knowledge, strategy, logistics, and workforce for these processes to take place. Thus we can see
very clearly the specific nature of the commons that feeds this enterprise, yet it is equally
important to have a better understanding of what are its forms of return of wealth to it, that is
to say, the kind of commons that it produces. Significantly, what in other fields can be
interpreted as a parasitic activity or cooptation, is here an additional element in an ecosystem
where politics, social struggle, cultural production, militancy and economy intersect.
One could argue that there is a long tradition of enterprises that try to introduce and reconcile
political tensions to their working models and find ways to redistribute the value and wealth
they generate. A clear example of this is constituted by the workers cooperatives. TdS is well
aware of this tradition and they have discussed on many occasions the pertinence of adopting
such a model and inserting themselves in that tradition. The main obstacle to this, again, has to
do with the notion of openness that defines the project. Whilst cooperatives are fairly closed
entities that define clear lines of inclusion and exclusion from the cooperative, and establish
clear rules as to whom should benefit from the wealth they generate, the case of TdS is quite
different. The degree of openness they have managed to establish allows the appropriation by
others of the tools, channels and resources they generate. The lack of clear boundaries implies
they can merge and be part of other projects (as we will explore later) relatively easily. They
interact with different communities and different social movements with whom they share the
infrastructures they have built.
One of the clearest examples of the processes of return from TdS to the communities in which
it operates, is in the form of translation and production of theoretical material designed to be
worked on within the social movements themselves. All the books published by TdS are
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licensed under a Creative Commons license which allows for the texts to be downloaded for
free from the publishing house’s website and then to be distributed via social networks. Hence,
something which, from a strictly economic point of view, can seem counterproductive, provides
a significant amount of credibility and demonstrates their commitment to the members of the
communities they work with. This form of return to the communities clearly establishes and
strengthens their links with the initiative. Furthermore, although the disproportion between the
number of books downloaded and those sold is certainly significant, the communities clearly
appreciate the gesture and support the publishing house by purchasing books whenever it is
possible, or by collaborating in translations, designs etc. when necessary. With this process TdS
revokes the unidirectional model of cultural industry critiqued by Adorno and Horkheimer
(2007), and instead, create a business model based on producing feedback cycles that contribute
to the formation of the communities in which it participates, as well as to the publishing profile
and to the shape the project is to take. On occasions, these circles are so small that it is
extremely difficult to separate TdS’s political activism from its business activity. From what we
have described so far, it would be reasonable to conclude that the commons generated by TdS is
limited to theoretical material and books which it makes available and distributes for free
through their publishing house. Although this is certainly the case, in what follows I will
examine TdS’s model of operation more closely in order to determine how they work to
generate what I will later define as a set of “unstable infrastructures”, which I consider to
constitute the true commons emerging out of the work of this initiative.
The premises where the project is located constitute, in fact, one of the most fascinating aspects
of TdS. In addition to a bookshop and their offices, the premises hold a solidarity economy
shop and various digital activist collectives. Furthermore, TdS provides space for different
collectives in the community and promotes a busy schedule of daily activities. Located in one of
the neighbourhoods of Madrid with the highest immigrant population rate, and totally
integrated in the life of the neighbourhood from its site at Embajadores 35, they offer
everything from book and comic-book presentations, to talks on solidarity economy and
postcolonial theory, neighbourhood meetings and forums on crime fiction. The first time that I
visited this space one thing immediately attracted my attention, namely the social composition
of those present. Whilst it is usually pretty homogeneous in cultural spaces and bookshops, at
TdS the social demography of the attendants is quite varied. All types of people congregate here:
dreadlocked activists in militant t-shirts, Senegalese immigrants learning languages,
neighbourhood kids, Moroccan women participating in workshops, hackers, students, social
researchers, and members of the creative classes. In stark contrast to traditional cultural spaces,
this is a distinctly multiethnic, versatile and dynamic space.
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Amongst the many activities offered in the different rooms and spaces of TdS’s premises, there
are free language classes for immigrants, chess lessons for neighbourhood children, and
workshops about the rights of immigrants without residence or work permits. And all of this
happens in parallel to the work of the collective’s members, who in their offices work on the
translation, design and distribution of new books for publication. The space is available for
“appropriation”, that is, it can easily hold/host a number of different activities with the only
condition that these be in keeping with the ideas and attitudes promoted by TdS. Film
projections, discussion forums, reading groups and solidarity economy workshops all take place
in these premises, making it a common space that members of social movements can consider a
shared resource.
Another of the initiatives housed in these premises is the distribution company which members
of TdS founded in order to better distribute their books, given that initially they had very limited
visibility in commercial sales platforms. This avenue has grown considerably and is today the
preferred route for the distribution of pamphlets, comic-books, fanzines and manuals created by
other collectives and members of social movements. In addition, TdS’s distributor house
collaborates and networks with other alternative distributors such as the Barcelona based Virus,
or Eguzki-Bideoak, and they have thus been able to articulate a network that allows for social
centres, independent spaces, and small and medium bookshops to stock books, magazines,
DVDs or t-shirts produced by political or militant groups. The distribution house, managed by
one single person, is aware of its limitations given that it can hardly compete with commercial
distribution companies with large platforms distributing books on a massive scale. And yet,
despite this fact, they have managed, by collaborating with other distributors, to give
considerable visibility to their own production and to present an interesting alternative to the
large distribution groups, usually the most powerful agents in the field.
Lastly it is important to pay appropriate attention to the design workshop’s involvement in the
creation of communication campaigns for different social struggles, militant collectives and
groups, and associations or businesses that are part of the social economy structure. During the
time that I have been following the development of Traficantes de Sueños, they have designed a
blog for the transport unions that called a strike in Madrid, as well as various ones for feminist
collectives. They have also put together a blog designed to follow the 15M events and, more
recently, they have collaborated in the creation of a blog called Madrilonia, which in a few
months has become a central information and denunciation point for the social and political
movements of the capital city. All this work is done on a voluntary basis and it is understood to
be part of the process of return to the political forms that feed their discourse. It is for this
reason that the business analysis canons are not adequate for understanding the model of
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production that TdS engages with, given that the former completely destroy the idea of
corporate social responsibility or notions such as that of the “triple result”. The business activity
of TdS is purely social, and it is their political work which sustains their business activity.
Traficantes de Sueños is thus a productive constellation in which the combination of its different
elements (publishing house, book shop, distributor, design workshop and social space) manages
to generate the necessary income to allow for the whole ecosystem to survive, notwithstanding
the differences between the profit and loss margins produced by the shop (always positive) and
those produced by the design workshop for instance (where a lot of time is invested in work for
no or a small fee, and when there is one, this is much lower than the market standard). It is for
this reason vital that all the members of the collective attend the weekly meetings and the annual
plenary, at which the project’s general strategic direction is discussed. One thing that almost all
of the collective’s members agree on is that the weekly meetings tend to be tedious, long, and
sometimes complicated and tense. However, they are necessary for the project, as it is within
these that the governance mechanisms that define and determine the collective are constituted.
A number of the systems implemented touch on the anecdotal (for example, in order to
encourage everyone to arrive at the appointed time, there is a rule that makes the last person to
arrive at a meeting pay for everyone’s breakfast), but others constitute true networks of
collective sustenance. One of the members, Almudena, let me in on something extremely
revealing, the fact that despite the precariousness that determines the whole project, she did not
feel especially vulnerable, nor did she consider herself to be more exposed to risk than many of
her colleagues who worked in “normal” businesses. This is in part due to the fact that the
project is conceived of as an affective network “born to alleviate the gradual disappearance of
the welfare state and make up for many of the deficiencies that the market is incapable of
satisfying”.
The introduction of a welfare network into the business sphere is not undertaken in order to
improve productivity as is the case in some Silicon Valley companies (Ross 2004, Thrift 2005),
but rather, it is done from within an ethical framework of care and against the disintegration of
the welfare state brought about by the advance of neoliberalism. It is for this reason that in the
meetings, the collective’s members have conversations and debates about strictly economic,
political or strategic issues, as well as personal and affective ones. This combination of different
aspects is clearly far removed from the strict demarcation of spaces for emotional display within
the business sphere (Illouz, 2010) and it can lead to complex and difficult-to-handle situations.
It is very easy to confuse personal debilitation with a certain exhaustion typical of militant
activism. A constant state of financial precariousness can also clearly add to a sense of personal
dissatisfaction. The complexity of this incorporation of the affective into the business sphere of
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the project is evident on specific occasions when certain personal issues are strategically brought
on to the table and can be perceived as a form of emotional blackmail. Although the
organisation can indeed assume certain social burdens, it will clearly never be able to cover many
of the basic services that are slowly disappearing. Nevertheless, many of the collective’s
members have emphasised the support they receive from this affective network, which helps
make up for the lack of profit and of other type of economic satisfactions.
We can see clearly the double relation to the commons which Traficantes is built on. On the one
hand, the collective is aware of the debt it owes to social and political movements and, on the
other, its model of internal organisation is reminiscent of the models designed to manage the
commons; that is the norms, control mechanisms and their own governance structures,
established in order to render the project sustainable, to structure the community of people that
make it up, and to manage the different services it offers. The situation is clearly not ideal, as
under this type of organisation, discussions of a business nature easily and continuously get
entangled into discussions of personal and affective issues, to such an extent that, on many
occasions, it is impossible to dissociate one from the other. Nevertheless, some of the outcomes
of these discussions are extremely interesting. Such is the case of the decision not to provide
salaries, understood as a form of remuneration for the hours worked on the project. Instead, the
profits obtained are equally distributed among the members of the collective, in order to leave
enough free time for each member to dedicate to their militancy. The conception of the project
as a political enterprise is thereby reinforced. On the other hand, lack of explicit hierarchies
(although they do exist implicitly) and of a business project or vision to define objectives for the
different work cells that make up the project, leads to a situation where the motivation for work
lies in purely personal incentives. According to David, the only original founding member still
actively linked to the project, one of the problems that derive from this situation is that many
projects or tasks that are agreed upon by consensus, end up not being finished because nobody
wants to or feels like working on them. Tasks like unifying databases, tidying up the file archive
or working on smaller projects that are not central to the collective, end up not being done.
Given that each member of the collective is expected to adhere to a system of personal
fulfilment (apart from the economic return) in order to do their work, many initiatives can end
up blocked due to lack of interest in them. Once militancy is introduced as a work-related
element, some tasks that are not considered to be of a strictly militant nature (such as designing
marketing campaigns for the books being published, working more directly with the press or
drawing up a business plan etc.) are simply not done. One of the long-term consequences of this
is that a certain level of frustration ends up affecting members of the project, who sometimes
perceive that their work is not being made the most of or that their level of work activity is not
fairly reflected in the economic income that the same activity generates.
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In addition we find that friction between productive and reproductive work, as well as
arguments as to whether seniority or full time work should be better compensated economically,
similarly arise. It is beyond any doubt that in the 15 years that the project has been in operation,
it has received and accumulated an amount of knowledge and know-how that benefits each and
every person who becomes part of the collective. Nonetheless, is it at all possible to have any
control over how this knowledge is exploited once a member decides to leave the project? Is
there a way of measuring what one person contributes to the project and what they take away
with them? Is it possible to put any value on the protection mechanisms that the collective
provides and can they in any way be thought of in terms of economic compensation? These
questions arise repeatedly in the collective’s debates and weekly meetings that structure the
project, and they allow us to clearly discern the division between TdS’s commons (what Pablo
defines as their primitive accumulation, in clear reference to Marx) and the commons that the
project feeds on. These doubts have sometimes led to very tense work sessions during which
the different positions are polarised and possible alternative solutions fester, ending up in very
nasty situations. Pragmatism and ideology are not always good friends, and in these debates this
fact is made inevitably clear.
Both the models of management and governance and the debates which sustain them are still
unripe and with an air of perpetual provisionality. This is partly to do with the complexity of the
debates encompassed and partly with the rift between the collective’s members as to the need to
discuss the project’s business model. Whereas a number of them feel it is vital to think about
and develop this discussion in depth, others feel less comfortable with the terms of the
discussion, as a result of which it has been impossible to arrive at more sophisticated business
and governance solutions. Yet on the other hand it is clear that the network of relations that
links the collective to the communities and social and political systems it participates with is
much more defined and developed. The preferred mode of introduction of the project by its
members is as “the node of a more complex social system” which they help produce and weave
together. And hence, in order to strengthen this system of relations, the collective’s members
collaborate with and participate in the creation of other similar projects, such as the Zaragoza
based social centre Pantera Rossa, which sustains itself with the help of its own bookshop,
Ateneu Candela, a similar project in Terrassa, or La Hormiga Atómica in Pamplona. They also
collaborate with alternative bookshops such as La Fuga in Seville or Atrapasueños, a travelling
bookshop in Andalucía. By helping create this network of projects and participating in it, TdS
not only gain more points of sales, they also create more space for political production which in
turn will generate content that TdS can help publish and distribute. According to Pablo, “the
more closely knit that these networks are, the more productive they become, from a social,
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political, and economic point of view. Hence we consider it part of our work to contribute to
putting these circuits together.”
One of the problems permeating many of the discussions at TdS, a problem that lies at the
centre of this hybrid formula known as “political enterprise”, is that of establishing the limits
between the political and the pragmatic. In other words, the question is how to structure certain
elements in order to facilitate work when productivity is not the ultimate aim. This is probably
the one question that has recurrently come up in the conversations I have held with the
different members of the collective. Needless to say, there is not one single answer or solution
for it. In terms of the flexibility of the work schedule, for instance, the fact that they do not have
to observe a rigid work schedule is one of the aspects of the project that its members are most
pleased about. Each of them chooses her or his own schedule and the only a priori set times are
those of the shop, which must be observed by the members in charge of it. As a result of this
flexibility certain tasks are sometimes considerably delayed when members do not coincide in
the office at the same time, and it also renders certain projects very difficult to manage as it
becomes increasingly complicated to think in terms of continuity. And even on those occasions
when a specific time is set for a meeting or a discussion timely attendance cannot be counted
on, as TdS’s members are known to always be considerably late. Although on the one hand this
clearly complicates the accomplishment of certain tasks, on the other hand it also helps define
this particular notion of political enterprise: its members are militants and not business workers.
And yet, problems such as this are experienced with a certain ambivalence. Although some of
the members are confident that they are never going to go to work early, they are nonetheless
worried about the lack of economic return and about the impossibility of carrying out certain
commitments quickly. One of the latest members to join the work team, Ana, is convinced that
the reason the organisation’s management will never be activated is because nobody is willing to
change the way they work. In other words, there is not a strong enough incentive to motivate
the collective’s members into changing their ways. In her opinion, “the existing routines and
methodologies are cemented to such a degree, that implementing a change or introducing
something new is a task close to impossible”. By contrast, David expresses it in political terms:
“we are not looking to make the management of the project more efficient, since our aim is to
be political agents, and not good business people”. Contradictions and discussions such as these
permeate a large part of the debates and projects at TdS.
The aforementioned thus clearly shows the difference between this model of production and
those promoted by the institutions fostering the creation of cultural enterprises. From a business
perspective, Traficantes is something of an aberration, given that it does not respect any of the
minimum rules of business management. And yet, in time, this project has demonstrated to be
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much more sustainable than many other similar enterprises who have implemented more
canonical models of operation. The question as to the exact extent that personal sacrifice and
volunteerism are the elements that help explain the longevity of the project will always remain.
Nonetheless, there is no doubt that this is a very clear example of a cultural enterprise that lives
and feeds on a commons that, despite the fragility of the ecosystem that it constitutes, still
manages to last. And yet, if the definition of cultural industries described these as enterprises
based on individual creativity with the capacity to generate wealth via the exploitation of
intellectual property, it is clear that Traficantes does not fit into any of the two established criteria.
Unstable infrastructures
I have shown how Traficantes de Sueños works with a commons composed of the ideas, discourses
and tensions that emerge out of the social movements. In addition, I have examined the
commons that constitutes the knowledge, know-how and governance models that have allowed
the project to exist and carry on for years. Lastly, I would like to suggest a third way of
understanding the commons that TdS’s activity generates, which I ultimately consider to be the
most interesting commons for our research. I am referring to the different elements with which
this initiative has managed to create a kind of “cultural infrastructure”, that is, the multiple
relations that have been established in the different projects and activities undertaken by the
collective, the promotion of a network of bookshops and self-publishing projects, the
accumulation of knowledge and infrastructures, and the constitution of distribution and
broadcasting channels for their contents. Despite being utterly unstable, this “cultural
infrastructure” constitutes a valuable resource for the communities within which it operates. I
am hereby using the concept of infrastructure as developed by Brian Larkin in his book “Signal
and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria”, which examines the
unexpected emergence of the largest film industry in Africa.
In his book, Larkin examines the use of large infrastructures of communication within the
framework of Nigeria’s colonisation by the United Kingdom. As he points out, “at the most
basic level, infrastructures are technical systems of transport, telecommunication, urban
planning, energy and water that create the skeleton of urban life. Analyzing media as technical
infrastructure gives greater analytic purchase on how these technologies operate as technical
systems” (Larkin, 2008:5). These basic elements, whose immediate function is to build up the
communication between regions and support their development, hold, at the same time, strong
symbolic power. The inauguration of bridges, dams and rail systems during the colonial period
was always accompanied by the display of the great symbolic power that these elements were
endowed with. According to Larkin, these were presented as “sublime elements”, whose
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splendour eluded the comprehension of the colonised peoples. The mass media follow a similar
logic. The initial introduction of a system of antennas and radio transmitters, followed by
television, is undertaken with full awareness of their capacity to order and impose structures of
colonial power. Larkin recognises a link between the Enlightenment ideal and the way that these
infrastructures are implemented. According to him, “the ideological development of
contemporary infrastructures has its roots in the Enlightenment project of rationality
engineering the world, ordering it according to the free circulation of goods and ideas”
(2008:8)”. The function of the infrastructure is that of imposing a specific market form. And at
this point it is important to recall Adorno and Horkheimer’s linking of the model of the cultural
industry with the Enlightenment ideal of rationality and repetition of production, which we have
thoroughly covered in Chapter 2.
Larkin argues that the colonial power reserved the control of the infrastructures in order
precisely to maintain a specific model of exploitation and a symbolic system of control. Against
this background, colonised societies began to define other models of production and exchange,
which in turn needed a different type of infrastructure to sustain it. The phenomenon of
Nigerian cinema is, according to Larkin, impossible to understand without first taking into
account the production and distribution infrastructures that have been put in place to support
this industry. These infrastructures differ greatly from those imposed by the colonial power and
are based on verbal agreements, piracy channels, informal networks of money circulation and
loans, etc. This particular understanding of piracy thus differs enormously from the
condemnation that it has been subject to by the big media corporations and lobbies. According
to the author, “I see piracy not simply in legal terms but as a mode of infrastructure that
facilitates the movement of cultural goods” (Larkin, 2008:14). The Nigerian context thus
constitutes a powerful infrastructure for the distribution of goods which has little to do with the
structures promoted by the creative industries, and yet, despite its high instability, it is extremely
powerful. It is thus clearly impossible to understand Nigerian cinema and its links with
Bollywood cinema or the financial networks of Saudi Arabia, without first considering piracy as
a form of infrastructure. In Larkin’s own words, “media piracy is part of the ‘organizational
architecture’ of globalization, providing the infrastructure that allows media goods to circulate”
(Larkin, 2008:217).
These infrastructures emerge as offshoots of the established channels and in many cases
constitute their darker reverse side, given that although their initial function is that of enhancing
the circulation of commercial films and music CDs, they are then appropriated by other
producers of content in order to distribute vernacular cinema. These “technological
infrastructures create material channels that organize the movement of energy, information and
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economic and cultural goods between societies, but at the same time create possibilities for new
actions” (Larkin, 2008:220), and, without a doubt, Traficantes de Sueños has clearly combined the
creation of their own content production and distribution infrastructures, with work in new
political actions and their promotion, which in some cases employ these common
infrastructures. The unstable infrastructures generated by Traficantes support the circulation of
books and films, as well as manifestoes and political documents. In addition, they allow for the
cooperation between different groups, working in a coordinated manner on various projects of a
militant nature. They also provide the space for meetings, assemblies, work groups and research
workshops, and, most importantly, they support the circulation and return of certain materials
back to the citizenship, which would otherwise be difficult for them to access. This is precisely
the real commons that we need to identify, as these infrastructures are neither public elements
nor do they stem from the private sector, as is the case with the large production and
distribution infrastructures used by the cultural industries to deliver their products to the
population. The hybrid nature of the infrastructures we are hereby examining, as well as their
extreme fragility, make it necessary to both protect and preserve them collectively, because it is
precisely this instability that which provides the necessary flexibility for them to interact with
heterogeneous elements and in different places. Replication, however, is not something that
these infrastructures are open to, given that they constitute a web of human relations, structures
of trust, tacit agreements, governance protocols and models, and technological systems.
One could argue that in a way, TdS function as a worker’s cooperative, that is as a collective
enterprise that redistributes profits amongst its members. But there is a key feature that
distinguishes the previous from the former; in the case of TdS we are talking about an open
enterprise where there are no formal rules or bureaucratic instances that legitimate who can be
part of or use the infrastructures generated by this group. The lack of formal regulations has
become replaced by a set of discussion groups, implicit norms, working dynamics etc. But as in
the traditional commons, there is an important sense of openness that needs to be taken into
account (Neeson, 1996). This opens an interesting debate about in what do these kinds of
organizations or what I describe as “unstable infrastructures” differ from what has been coined
as “informal economies”(Hart 1973, Phal 1988, Benton 1990, Castells and Portes 1989).
Although acknowledging that “the informal economy is a common-sense notion whose moving
social boundaries cannot be captured by a strict definition without closing the debate
prematurely”(Castells & Portes, 1989:11) I would argue there is an important difference. Most
accounts of the informal economy agree that these practices emerge in unregulated spaces.
Informality arises in the interstices of the state and the private sector, and in some cases workers
may switch between the formal forms of employment and carrying out informal activities even
during the same workday or at the same workspace; but the lack of regulation is central for these
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hybrid economies to exist. Castells & Portes go as far as to argue that “in an ideal market
economy, with no regulation of any kind, the distinction between formal and informal would
lose meaning since all activities would be performed in the manner we now call
informal”(1989:13). In contrast, the kinds of economies I am discussing are highly regulated, but
in this case regulations do not come from the state or from corporate pressures but stem from
the communities and collectives involved in these forms of exchange. Commons-based
economies are self-regulated and there are a number of elements devised to ensure these implicit
norms are followed but there is also enough openness to allow new actors to interact, tap into
and make use of these infrastructures. In this way the discussion is not centred around the
formality or informality of these practices but on the capacity that these communities have to
generate and enforce their own sets of regulations and protocols. It’s a matter of political
autonomy, not merely a form of exchange. With this I do not want to imply that members of
these communities do not use formal or informal markets to provision themselves (Mollona,
2007) but these unstable infrastructures constitute a space in which these different practices
become entangled giving place to a different order in which these distinctions cease to be
relevant.
Conclusions
Against the increasing neoliberalisation of mass media, electromagnetic waves and internet
access, these common infrastructures constitute a new source of common wealth. I have used
the term unstable to punctuate the difference between these infrastructures and the
infrastructural elements set down by different national states and large corporations, defined
precisely by their capacity to be present in a continuous manner without being noticed.
Telecommunication networks, satellites, rail routes, television and radio relay masts etc. all
constitute infrastructural elements at the service of the traditional creative industries to deliver
their content and messages to the bulk of the population. By contrast, unstable infrastructures
are not always present. They are based on agreements, affinity networks, favours, commitments
etc. and are characterised by intermittence. In addition, Larkin even mentions the aesthetic
qualities that predominate in the products generated and distributed from within these unstable
infrastructures: “piracy creates a particular aesthetic, a set of formal qualities that generate a
particular sensorial experience of media marked by poor transmission, interference and noise”
(Larkin, 2008:219).
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Interruptions in pirate radio signals52, the possibility of malfunction of bootleg DVDs, the
uncertain continuity of self-managed social centres, the impossibility of determining the
publication date for the next TdS book, and the interruptions characteristic of non-professional
streaming constitute, among many others, the elements that define these unstable
infrastructures. These elements, far from remaining constant and invisible, surface precisely
because of their multiple faults, interruptions and glitches. Unstable infrastructures are noise-
filled channels. And yet they constitute a significant resource for those communities who use
them in order to produce culture, launch activist campaigns, or organise social protest
movements. Sometimes unstable infrastructures emerge as the reverse of proprietary
infrastructures, as is the case with the free software social network N-1, which mirrors many of
the functions of Facebook. In these cases it is clear how these unstable infrastructures link the
social to the commons, as well as allowing for the extraction of knowledge from the cultural
commons to have a generative character, given that the infrastructures themselves become
common elements. These elements, that are born as bifurcations from the hegemonic
discourses, can in turn be appropriated and captured for economic ends and thus this is
something that I will examine in the next chapter. Nevertheless, given the social composition of
the users of this type of unstable infrastructures, and due precisely to their common structure -
akin to the processes that take place in Free Software - the infrastructures will re-form, re-
produce and re-signify every time they are used.
It is important to understand the importance of these infrastructures in the context of cultural
production as the companies, collectives or subjects that contribute to create them do not only
guarantee the access to those goods licensed under copyleft licenses (such as Creative
Commons, GPL etc.) but guarantee that they remain productive elements. In that sense, and
returning to some of the discussions in chapter two of this work, we can agree that those
cultural enterprises that guarantee access to part of the goods they produce by using open
licenses are helping to shape a new mode of production; the production of unstable
infrastructures constitutes an essential step in order to generate a sustainable economic system
around free culture and the cultural commons. At this stage I would argue that it is as important
to use free licenses on cultural contents as it is to be able to enable de-circulation of these
goods, provide storing facilities, enable P2P networks to distribute contents and work towards
the production of these unstable infrastructures. These are “commons carriers” (Hyde, 2010),
but also constitute common elements in themselves as they allow the commons to continue to
exist.
52
For a more detailed study of interruptions and interference in pirate radios, see ‘Media Ecologies’ by
Matthew Fuller, 2005.
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Unstable infrastructures are constituted by a dense ecosystem of agents, collectives, institutions,
networks, digital protocols, tools, favours, agreements, commitments, money and value spheres
that combine in order to give place to more open and porous production models. As opposed
to the rigid models defined by the promotion entities and institutional policies, these
infrastructures are born in the midst of the creative basins and contribute to expand and defend
them. They are only productive if they manage to get more and more entangled in the
communities, movements and dynamics from which they emerge. They are only productive if
they manage to become common. Instead of individuality they produce commonalities, instead
of promoting individual creativity they produce common resources. That is the only way they
can constitute an alternative to the hegemonic models.
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Chapter Seven.
Parasitism and Capture of the Cultural
and Digital Commons
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Solo soy una alimaña pero tengo corazón
Solo soy una alimaña, by Los Cafres
In the previous chapter I have analyzed the bifurcations and alternative models that stem from
the hegemonic discourses that define the creative industries. We have seen, through an example,
how communities and certain collectives can create their own infrastructures that enable them
to produce and distribute cultural, social and political artefacts. These provide them with
independence from the formal and corporate production channels. Unstable infrastructures
allow these communities to tap into the cultural commons from which they extract ideas and
knowledge but at the same time they constitute a new type of communal resource themselves.
These unstable infrastructures can be appropriated by other members of the communities who
can give them different uses. They help to generate sustainable relations with the commons, as
they are generative structures. They introduce noise, imperfections and aesthetic qualities into
the goods that they enable to produce and distribute.
But we must not forget that these same infrastructures can fall victims to other forms of
capture, free-riders willing to capture elements from the commons who aren’t willing to
contribute back. The openness of these infrastructures implies they can be used by other actors
who may have different intentions. These different relations with the commons can become
more complex with the introduction of digital technologies and digital labour and the
boundaries that define communities can become much more frail and complex. In this chapter I
will explore how online platforms designed to promote participation and collaboration can also
constitute apparatus of capture of collective work and knowledge. The immateriality of the
commons makes them more prone to being accessed and captured from many actors who have
little to do with their production or preservation. To understand this process better, I will
introduce the figure of the parasite, an ambivalent element present in every system which feeds
from the information and signals that go from point to point. With the help of Michel Serres, I
will try to address the complexity of this element that as we will see, taps into different networks
but also enables them to exist.
In order to see how the relations of parasitism can become very complex, but at the same time
can remain extremely productive, I will introduce the music scene generated around tecnobrega
as a case study. Tecnobrega, born in Belem, in the region of Pará in Brazil, constitutes an
excellent example of an emergent music scene defined by the informality of its relations, by the
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strength of the communities that constitute it and by the complex bundle of relations between
this movement and the formal creative industries. We will see how their ability to create a set of
unstable infrastructures of production, promotion and distribution,has allowed them to regulate
the flows of money, music, favours and ideas that shape the field. The fact that this musical
movement has no interest or respect for intellectual property, and that most of its compositions
derive directly from copyrighted music, puts it into an unorthodox relation with conventional
media. With this chapter I intend to depict the complexity that defines alternative cultural
production and helps to explore its ecosystems of production and distribution, seeing where
value can be produced and where it can be captured. This depiction will challenge orthodox
Marxist and traditional views on exploitation based on binary models and linear systems.
Free Labour and the Digital Commons
Media theorist Tiziana Terranova has worked on analyzing the productive relations between the
creative basins, or the cultural commons, and the new forms of labour and capture of value that
have emerged in digital networks. New systems of exploitation have become apparent with the
introduction of a whole new set of digital means of production. In her book Network Cultures she
analyzes how the internet has developed a variety of apparatus aimed at capturing and valorizing
the knowledge produced collectively by what she terms “free labourers”, that is, subjects caught
up in networks of collaboration whose work is essential for the constitution of the internet. In
her work she argues that these forms of work are not only characteristic of the digital economy
but have a direct correlation to practices taking place in the whole social fabric. In her work she
describes a double process of appropriation: on the one hand the knowledge produced
collectively (the social knowledge discussed in the first chapter of this work) becomes a
resource, but in order to capture this knowledge subjects need to be introduced into platforms
of collaboration and participation. Time and knowledge are the basic elements that in
Terranova’s views, sustain the production of wealth in the digital realm. In her own words
“netslaves are not simply a typical form of labour on the internet; they also embody a complex
relation to labour, which is widespread in late capitalist societies” (Terranova, 2004:73). As she
continues arguing, the emergence of the “social factory” and the implosion of forms of
production have found in the internet a fertile ground to expand. In that sense she sustains that
the “digital economy is not a new phenomenon, but simply a new phase of this longer history of
experimentation” (Terranova, 2004:80). If cognitive capitalism relies on the articulation and
cooperation of anonymous brains willing to engage in collective creative activities, the internet
provides the perfect space to enable this to happen. In this sense, Terranova envisages a sense
of continuity between the ways that capital operates inside and outside the net.
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As we have seen in previous chapters, far from their “romantic” non-commercial origins, digital
practices have shifted from constituting a cooperative and non-lucrative endeavour to shortly
becoming dominated by market dynamics. In this sense the digital economy has a very specific
function for cognitive capitalism; Terranova envisages “the digital economy as a specific
mechanism of internal capture of larger pools of social and cultural knowledge. The digital
economy is an important area of experimentation with value and free cultural/affective labour”
(Terranova, 2004:79). It constitutes the space in which externalities can be captured and
valorized, in which people communicate, cooperate and share knowledge, but also where these
disseminated forms of knowledge can be captured and turned into economic flows. It is the
space where the enclosure of the cultural commons becomes effective. The digital economy
constitutes a perfect machine to locate, capture and valorize the knowledge of the commons. It
can transform abstract knowledge into valuable information. In some cases this will occur more
or less consciously. Search engines will sell data sets to corporations, informing about search
trends, social perceptions or needs. This data has been generated through individual searches
which are aggregated and turned into information. This could lead us to think that ‘Google
doesn’t work for us, we work for Google’.
Terranova writes that “the fruits of collective cultural labour have been not simply appropriated,
but voluntarily channelled and controversially structured within capitalist business practices”
(Terranova, 2004:80); in many cases subjects actively contribute with ideas to online discussions,
forums, lists or upload content to online platforms which will later claim ownership over these
contents. The intellectual property of the contents uploaded on networking sites in many cases
belongs to such platforms; they are liable for misuse, but also entitled to exploit the rights
generated by uploaded content. Based on the analysis of these facts, Terranova coins the
expression “free labour” to define all the work that is being put into the digital economy but
goes unpaid. In her own words, free labour is “the moment where this knowledgeable
consumption of culture is translated into excess productive activities that are pleasurably
embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited” (Terranova, 2004:78). The reasons
why people feel inclined to contribute or work on these platforms remains unexplored in
Terranova’s work; she incites us to think that this is just a prolongation of dynamics that already
are taking place outside the internet and is just a continuation of the dissemination of the
factories into the social fabric.
Utrecht-based new media theorist, Mirko Tobias Schafer, has studied the technical and
discursive mutations that have taken place on online platforms in order to encourage
participation and capture the work of users, and helps us to understand the reasons people
contribute to the growth of these sites. Under the name of “participatory culture” he describes
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the new role users have assumed in the context of cultural production. He argues the cultural
industries are undergoing a process of transformation that is changing their role from being
content producers to becoming content enablers. Now cultural corporations design platforms
and sites aimed at capturing flows of participation, in which users can upload, modify, tag, remix
and share contents. He argues that in most cases these platforms and the technologies they rely
on are “presented as a neutral means for enabling users to get in touch with their community
and to benefit from collective achievements” (Schafer, 2011:36). This discourse overshadows
the processes in which the contents and information generated by users becomes privatized and
commodified. In most cases users are unaware of the terms of use they sign when enrolling on
these platforms or they hardly understand the legal implications of their activities. You must
follow a set of rules and protocols that in most cases alienate users from the contents they have
uploaded or produced on such sites.
Schafer explains how there are two types of participatory platforms, explicit and implicit. In the
first case users are aware that they are contributing to the production of contents, improving the
site, uploading images or sounds, sharing experiences etc. In this case, participation is “driven by
motivation (…) implicit participation is channelled by design, by means of easy-to-use
interfaces, and the automation of user activity processes” (Schafer, 2011:51). But many people
are not aware that many technological products are improved by implicit participation, that is,
ways in which users contribute to its design, debugging or implementation. These platforms
capture information generated by its users and transform it into new implementations, future
designs etc. However in these processes of implicit participation, as well as in many information
management systems, participation “unfolds implicitly, and many users are actually not aware
that they contribute to an application simply through using it” (Schafer, 2011:51). These
technologies transform users into producers without them even noticing it. Many of these
platforms or sites later offer information, services, applications or tools for a fee, and as Schafer
argues, “the offered services or production means revolve around the (generally unpaid and
unacknowledged) labour of users, who modify media texts, create content, or distribute it. It
characterizes a significant shift in culture industries from creating media content for
consumption towards providing platforms where content is created either by users or where
copyright-protected material is modified according to the platform provider’s terms” (Schafer,
2011:148). So we see how the dark side of all those discourses that celebrate participation and
online collaboration put forward by techno-prophets, such as Jeff Howe (2008), Henry Jenkins
(2008), Clay Shirky (2009) or Yochai Benkler (2007), is a process of explicit or implicit capture
and privatization of collective knowledge. Web 2.0 and these online platforms for production
and participation are perfect machines to extract time and value from users who happily
contribute to their growth and enrich these sites with user-generated contents and ideas.
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The processes of production of collaborative knowledge that take place in the “creative basins”
have found a new space in which to develop. In that sense Terranova argues that “internet is
not only a site of disintermediation but also the means through which a flexible, collective
network intelligence has come into being” (Terranova, 2004:75). Free labour is the
materialization of social forms of creativity in the digital economy. The net has developed into a
set of capture apparatus aimed at capturing the value generated through these collective
processes and turning it into economic wealth. This process of “incorporation is not about
capital descending on authentic culture, but a more immanent process of channelling of
collective labour (even as cultural labour) into monetary flows and its structuration within
capitalist practices” (Terranova, 2004:80).
So far we see how Terranova develops the ideas put forward by post-autonomist thinkers and
explores how these mechanisms of production of value and wealth operate in the digital
economy. The production system described by the first, in which forms of self-organized
elements cooperate in order to generate collective ideas and inventions and is threatened by
private interests prepared to capture this knowledge and turn it into profit, fits perfectly within
the digital economy in which more sophisticated mechanisms have been put into place in order
to channel this knowledge. In Terranova’s arguments, the knowledge or cultural commons are
not only under threat by the traditional creative industries that we have been discussing until
now, but also by all those corporations that feed from online participation and the social time
captured by digital technologies. New media theorist Matteo Pasquinelli, has also discussed the
ways in which the commons have been captured and turned into productive entities, in his book
Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons he formulates a harsh critique of the free culture
movement and those who defend the importance of the knowledge commons. He argues that
the real generation of profits never takes place in the creative basins, communities or commons
where value is produced, but instead it is large corporations that produce tangible products who
mostly benefit from immaterial work and social knowledge. He writes “the fact that all the
immaterial, cultural, symbolic, network and gift economies have a material, parallel and dirty
counterpart, where the real money is exchanged is a difficult point to grasp for radical thought”
(Pasquinelli, 2008:124). In his views, it is those corporations that produce hardware,
technological gadgets or that deal with real state that are extracting the real benefits from the
commons by establishing a parasitical relationship with these productive elements.
Pasquinelli – relying heavily on David Harvey – uses the notion of rent to define the model
which allows benefits to be extracted from the commons. Not acknowledging examples such as
Traficantes de Sueños or many others that show empirically how other mechanisms can be devised
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in order to find sustainable relationships with these commons, he argues that “the economy of
rent is becoming the other side of the commons, the silent parasite exploiting the living labour
of the multitude stored particularly in the free-access resource of the digital commons”
(Pasquinelli, 2008:47). He seems to be unaware of a long tradition of works, including Ostrom
1990, Stallman 2009 or Moulier-Butang 2010, that show how rent is not only produced outside
the commons but can be and has been a way, among many others, to produce profits for the
commons. Even though, with Pasquinelli we can admit that “any immaterial space has its
material parasites. Any shared music file ends up with its iPod”( Pasquinelli , 2008:117), in the
following pages I want to question this notion of the parasite as an univocal and linear system as
described by Pasquinelli and open it up to a much more complex form of relationship. Working
through this notion of parasitism, possibly one of Pasquinelli’s most notable contributions is to
describe an ecosystem in which the commons can help other elements to strive. Metaphorically
he sustains that “the immaterial parasite always belongs to a diverse family and can survive in
different kinds of habitat. Its tentacles, for instance, can innervate the metropolis (real estate
speculation through the ‘creative cities’ hype), the mediascape (rent over material infrastructures
and online space monopolies), the software industry (exploiting Free Software to sell proprietary
hardware), the knowledge economy (revenue on intellectual property), the financial markets
(stock exchange speculation on collective behaviour) and many other potential spaces”
(Pasquinelli, 2008:64). What he fails to address are the possible benefits or ways in which these
other industries can help to enhance and promote the commons. The clearest cases can be
found in the software industry, as I have shown in previous chapters, many software
corporations have made donations or have actively contributed to writing free software,
evolving into a symbiotic relation rather than a on a simple relation of exploitation one. Many
other cultural practices have come into place in which the use of the contents produced by
others (what Lessig has coined remix culture, Lessig 2008) have been jammed into new cultural
practices that themselves have shaped other contents. With this I want to challenge the
unidirectional depiction proposed by Pasquinelli, introducing a paradigm in which parasitism
needs to be understood as a productive instance that can be beneficial to many elements of the
productive chain.
Not so nice, not so linear
In an attempt to fracture this linear relation that defines the host and the parasite as two stable
categories, new media theorist Olga Goriunova, has put forward a fierce critique to some of
Tiziana Terranova’s ideas. In her article ‘Autocreativity. The Operation of Codes of Freedom in
Art and Culture’(Goriunova, 2008) she argues that the Marxist left, and Terranova in particular,
have failed to understand the complexity of economic systems. In her own words “Terranova’s
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work is demonstrative of the general dynamics of Marxist thinking as it adds up to the history of
the impossibility of thinking multiplicities and conditionalities within a dialectical system of
categories” (Goriunova, 2008:102). She believes that Terranova’s account on how the digital
economy has generated a reservoir of free labourers, who are unaware of the benefits they are
generating for the owner of the platforms in which they participate, is too linear and that the
notions of production and exploitation should be rethought in a new paradigm. In this sense she
states that “participatory and social platforms, network cultures become labelled as machines of
exploitation and subsumption, deformation of freedom, communication and desire by
approaches essentially Marxist, which see the social plane as a totality” (Goriunova, 2008:103).
The fact of seeing the social realm as an undifferentiated system is the main critique that
Goriunova and others have formulated; they believe that a degree of complexity and uncertainty
needs to be added to the system in order for it to be a functional method of analysis.
Another aspect that Goriunova highlights from Terranova’s work is that she simplifies the fact
that the digital economy constitutes an experimentation space for late capitalism. This could be
true, but at the same time a multiplicity of processes, struggles, inventions and desires are taking
place which can distort the linear arrow of capitalism. Bifurcations need to be taken into
account, in order to break the linearity of certain discourses. For Goriunova “Terranova
happens to build a picture of the passage of capitalism as a smooth, seamless, monolithic
process”(Goriunova, 2008:102); she believes that a degree of complexity needs to be introduced
into this equation if we are to get a more accurate picture of all the processes and dynamics
concurring in the digital economy. Only by doing so, we will be able to understand all those
false tracks, bifurcations, labyrinths, aporias and spaces for desire and resistance that are
emerging in the intersections of the social, the digital and the economic spheres.
In order to deepen the debate, I will introduce some of the ideas developed in the book The
Parasite by the philosopher of science Michel Serres, which I believe can help us to formulate an
interesting critique to some of the ideas implicit in the arguments put forward by some of the
authors I have discussed in this chapter. Following with the thread proposed by Goriunova,
Serres states that systems are always unstable and that any sense of equilibrium is just an ideal,
an abstract representation. It is for this reason that in any given system the host and its parasite
have always interchangeable roles. Serres puts the figure of the parasite as a central element to
understand any kind of social or economic system. In his own words, “we parasite each other
and live amidst parasites. We live in that black box called the collective; we live by it, on it, and
in it”(Serres, 2007:10). Any given system is based on a set of parasitical relations. The parasite is
not something to be eliminated, because it is a constitutive element of the system, it can be any
given element in any given time, “there is no system without parasites” (Serres, 2007:12). Only
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elements in closed systems tend not to vary position, but in contrast as open systems
continuously interact with the environment, the elements that constitute them cannot be fixed
but are always dynamic entities.
If we look at the systems defined by post-autonomous thinkers, we can see how in their model,
subjects cooperate in order to produce knowledge which is being captured by corporations that
are able to valorize and generate benefits from this knowledge (produce innovations). The
production of inventions is location in the creative basins; corporations parasite this production
and extract value from the basins through the channels I have described previously. If we are to
apply Serres’ ideas, both the basins and corporations parasite each other, they belong to an open
system in which they are always in a parasitical relation to each other. Both elements are
powerful; Serres states that the power of the parasite, “comes simply from the fact that he is the
relation and not fixed in the essence, that he is not fixed in a station but is in the functioning of
the relations in his being part of the warp and woof, that he is relational and thus that he is
multiple and collective” (Serres, 2007:64). The free software movement has reproduced
proprietary software and re-written code in order to imitate its functionalities, that is, has
parasited the externalities derived from the corporate knowledge put into proprietary software. 53
It is also well known that big chunks of corporate software are derived from free software (as is
the case of Hotmail which runs off FreeBSD, a free software operating system), where the
parasite is the corporation. This mutual appropriation of knowledge, technologies, ideas, etc.
might be unfair on occasions, but in any case, there is not a clear winner and a clear loser.
Externalities are captured by either side. The parasite parasites the parasite. Sociologist Michel
Callon argues that for externalities to make sense, a frame must be put in place (Callon, 1998).
He argues that artificial boundaries need to be negotiated in order to define who and where
externalities are being produced. Again this implies a closed system, an ideal that does not
overlap with reality. One cannot frame an open system, as its ontology implies that it will
interact with its environment, introducing and expelling elements on a continuous basis.
The model that Serres introduces differs radically from the closed model described by post-
autonomous scholars. If in the second identity it is fixed, in the first it is contingent and
relational. The parasite “is the essence of relation. It is necessary for the relation and ineluctable
by the overturning of the force that tries to exclude it. But this relation is nonrelation. The
parasite is being and nonbeing at the same time” (Serres, 2007:79). Nothing is only a parasite or
only a host. Host and parasite keep exchanging positions in the system. There is an element of
indetermination that constantly shapes the system. Contributors to blogs, lists and online
53For an amusing account of this process, see the chapter on Richard Stallman in the book Hackers by
Stephen Levy (Levy, 1984).
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platforms produce contents but also benefit from them. The chains of externalities are
interwoven on a constant basis, they can be captured in any point of the system. In some cases
they will generate economic returns, in other cases, new knowledge. They can be transformed
into tools or they can dissipate. The system is by definition unstable.
As we have seen, corporations seek to find channels to capture and valorize knowledge without
having to give any returns to its producers. They try to escape the logic of exchange, which is
only possible because “exchanges are possible only if a relation is instituted (…) The parasite
precedes the exchanger, the broker. The parasitic relation precedes exchange in general” (Serres,
2007:80). Once these channels are formalized the nature of the relation between the elements
will change dramatically. Externalities are transformed into assets. Negotiations start taking
place, abuse needs to be removed from the system. It is pushed into (temporal) equilibrium. The
parasite implies abuse value. All of these dynamics share the same medium and take place in the
same system. Systems function with several norms at a time, elements are always relational, the
parasite and the host are relational elements, abuse value precedes use value. This way of
envisaging the system introduces a degree of complexity that some Marxist accounts lack. It
helps to redefine the idea of exploitation. It gives us a more accurate description of how these
elements function and relate to each other.
If we look closely to the ecosystem presented by Serres we see that he acknowledges that rents
are central to some production models. There is no denying the role rents play in these complex
economic systems, but Serres also points out that rents are not the only forms of transaction
that take place in the system. Money circulates among many other elements. The parasite helps
us become aware of the different forms of circulation that take place as it feeds and enables
many of them. In Serre’s fables the farmer parasites the work of the labourers, but by night the
mice eat the farmer’s cheese, feasting on the farmer’s surplus. The mice make noise, and wake
the farmer up. The fields and crops need the sun in order to grow. The farmer benefits from the
sun, the energy his workers have put into the fields and the money he extracts from the crops.
The mice benefit from all of this. They have fleas, who parasite their bodies. It is in this
complex network of relations that Serres declares that “the real ultimate capital is the sun”
(Serres, 2007:173). Rents travel alongside flows of energy. Noise opens-up and closes systems.
The parasite is always there to create and feed on these different flows. The parasite appears and
hacks into one of these flows and by doing so opening a new relation. This “relation upsets
equilibrium, making it deviate. If some equilibrium exists or ever existed somewhere, somehow,
the introduction of a parasite in the system immediately provokes a difference, a disequilibrium.
Immediately, the system changes; time has begun” (Serres, 2007:182).
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What we discover is that rents constitute a form of exchange. They take place in one of the
more formalized channels of the system, they are constitute instituted channels of parasitism.
The parasite helps us understand all the other relations that go along the exchange - the flows of
matter and energy that enable the exchange to become apparent. The critique to some of the
Marxist positions described previously does not challenge the existence of unequal relations of
power or the role rent has shaping the economy of culture. The introduction of the parasite
helps us realize those other processes that occur simultaneously. The parasite helps us envisage
the concomitant spheres of value that operate at any given point. It doesn’t constitute a rapture
to the ideas put forward by some Marxist scholars, it widens the framework for interpreting
these exchanges.
The ideas and time of the LEGO fan who uploads his or her models on a participatory virtual
environment will be captured and can be transformed into rents. But we mustn’t forget the
information about other models he or she can gather from the place, the feedback and symbolic
capital to be gathered by doing so, the chances for collaborating with others the space can offer
or the time he or she saves by replicating the models uploaded by other users. Many systems of
value start taking place. The networks used to access the site also extract a rent from these
transactions, but these networks can be hacked and used for many other activities. In a nutshell,
the parasite helps us to see a complex ecosystem of formalized relations of exchange (rents),
non-formalized relations and the circulation of tangible and intangible elements (vanity,
recognition, information, money, ideas etc.). Rent helps us understand unequal relations of
power, the parasite the complex systems where there relations take place.
Tecnobrega
To exemplify a complex cultural system in which the figure of the parasite is by no means fixed
or clear, let me introduce a very interesting example of cultural practice I came across whilst
doing fieldwork in Brazil. I owe the discovery of tecnobrega to the scholar and Creative
Commons activist Ronaldo Lemos, who generously pointed it out to me and shared the data he
had already collected on the subject with me. Tecnobrega – which literally means “cheesy
techno” – is a musical genre that was born in Belém, in the state of Pará, in the North of Brazil,
and stems from a cottage musical industry and the local communities that have supported this
musical genre. We could argue that tecnobrega constitutes an example of a bigger cultural
phenomenon that has been branded “global periphery”,54 in which we can find many different
54
Lemos uses the portuguese expression “a musica electronic globoperiférica”, as he describes a global
musical trend which shares many things in common, specially a similar production and distribution,
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styles of music, such as Kuduro in Angola, Kwaito in South Africa, Bubblin in Suriname,
Sonideros in Mexico or Funky Carioca and Tecnobrega in Brazil.
The following case study is based on a combination of notes from my field diary, other scholars’
research, interviews with agents related to the scene, and information and opinions gathered
from the band’s websites and blogs. My aim is not so much to analyze tecnobrega as such, but
to show the different types of relations established between the multiplicity of agents that
contribute to generate this scene. I want to show how the relations of interdependence
established among the different actors, technologies and sources of funding create what Serres
has named as “parasitic cascades”, that is, relations in which parasites, parasite other parasites.
Musicians rely on music composed by international artists for their compositions, street vendors
rely on musicians in order to sell illegal copies of their music, musicians need street vendors as
they constitute their main channel of distribution, parties rely on the appropriation and
development of technologies, DJs re-mix pirated CDs at the parties, promoters rely on the name
of DJs in order to attract audiences, fans decide which songs are important and which are not,
they later go to see the bands play live. This complex system has strived without the need of
intellectual property or major labels or distributors; now we will see how it functions.
My very first contact with tecnobrega was completely random and it happened on my first trip
to São Paulo.Here I will directly paste some notes from my fieldwork that show clearly how
unexpected it was:
This is almost the end of my third week in Sao Paulo, I’m returning home on Wednesday. I
have conducted almost all the interviews and met almost everybody that I intended to, I am
taking the day off. I still have to prepare my talk in SENAC on Monday but I have time. A
couple of times I have tried to get my hands on Brazilian metal but almost all the music
shops in the high streets are poorly supplied with contemporary music. They’ve got plenty
of music from the US, some Brazilian pop, obviously Samba and Bossa Nova, but not
much more. This has been one of the things I haven’t fully grasped, as Brazil is well-known
for its music, but it is very difficult to get this music in the stores, they don’t seem to have
sections for Brazilian smaller bands, indigenous music or acts other than pop. This is the
reason why two friends have offered to take me to a place they know I am going to love,
Galeria do Rock, a five store shopping mall specializing in heavy metal located in the old city
centre. I am delighted with the idea!
that I will analyze in the following pages. http://www.overmundo.com.br/overblog/tudo-dominado-a-
musica-eletronica-globoperiferica (Last Accessed October 2011).
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We go down and leave the car in an underground car park, we should better walk. The old
city centre is very interesting but it is also a rough place, large abandoned skyscrapers have
been squatted and a lot of impoverished families have taken over its streets. The main
cathedral stands in the Praça de Sé, surrounded by one of the largest gatherings of
homeless people I have ever seen, the atmosphere is always slightly charged. The city’s
authorities have started schemes aimed at attracting young people to live in the centre
again, cheap rents and facilities have been put into place in an attempt to gentrify the area,
which remains pretty wild. One of the people I interview, Loro, is thinking of moving into
the centre. He is an upcoming artist and he says he likes the atmosphere down here,
although he admits that sometimes things here can get a bit out of hand, but still, artists
and creative people have started to come to the bars and drinking places in this area,
especially the ones near the red light district. The whole place has nothing to do with the
European city centres I have known. We are walking in a group and a couple of people
have approached us trying to sell us drugs or asking for money, we have no cameras or
flashy phones on display so nobody seems that interested in us.
In order to get to the music store we needed to cross a street in which many people had
gathered. As we came close I understood that all the people there are buying, looking or
chatting with the thousands of street vendors that have taken over the street.
A stream of cultural goods cover the street that is full of blankets set on the floor on which
each vendor has about 50 to 60 CDs or DVDs on display. At the beginning, the street
seems to be just pure noise, millions of pieces of plastic creating a colourful and random
mosaic. Too much information, it’s all a bit chaotic and confusing. After some minutes,
things start to make sense and I begin to perceive patterns and some order to what I was
seeing. The first items I identify are mostly Disney DVDs, some are classic movies and
some recent feature films that are currently being screened at cinemas. Other American
blockbusters catch my attention, also Michael Jackson and Destiny’s Child seemed to
appear quite a lot on the different carpets. But among these items I see many others
unknown to me. Brazilian dance music, some Caribbean music, bregacalypso, tecnobrega,
some seemed homemade compilations, current Brazilian cinema and even, from what I can
deduce from the cover, Brazilian metal. I am in the middle of one of the most important
arteries for the distribution of cultural goods in Sao Paulo and it is not even signalled on
the maps!
After getting hold of some Brazilian metal, I also purchase some CDs of unknown bands
which seem to be present in almost all these improvised stores. I get “Banda Capypso”, as
the name pops-up almost everywhere, and also get a CD by “Joao Brasil” because I simply
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like the record covers, finally I get some “greatest hits” style CDs, which include a number
of bands which I have never heard of. I pay 4 R$, about £1.5, for each album”.
I wasn’t aware that I had purchased my first tecnobrega albums until when at a conference held
two days later, I came across Ronaldo Lemos who was discussing the research he had been
conducting on this music scene with the Fundação Getulio Vargas. Back in Spain I started to
read and research more thoroughly on the way this music is produced, distributed and
consumed, and hence I started planning my second trip to Brazil. I had listened to some
tecnobrega CDs previous to my arrival in Brazil and got hold of some more CDs adding to the
ones I originally purchased in São Paulo, and although I knew that tecnobrega has now become
mainstream in Brazil, Ona Castro and Ronaldo Lemos argue that “a research conducted by
Data/Folha in 2007 showed that the band Capypso was the most listened to band in
Brazil”(Lemos & Castro, 2008:16), I could have never imagined to what extent this music (that
in most cases lacks record labels or promotion schemes to support it), was present in people’s
everyday lives. Even in public buses you can hear tecnobrega blasting out of the speakers. Even
though, I must admit that tecnobrega can be a bit annoying, I couldn’t keep myself from
humming and bobbing my head to these tunes which in some cases re-mix European and North
American pop hits.55 This music style follows a simple structure, usually the songs are based on
and re-mix a pre-existing tune, usually a well known pop song (especially hits from the eighties),
the rhythm is altered and a base guitar and digital piano are introduced, finally musical
arrangements are introduced, usually a piano line that follows the melody. Between the choruses
Portuguese lyrics are introduced completing the song.
The easiest way to purchase tecnobrega CDs is at the street markets and one of the most
striking aspects of these places is that almost all the contents they sell aren’t original recordings.
In most cases these vendors, or camelos,56 burn the copies and print their own covers of the CDs
they sell. In some cases, the best albums are mass produced by pressing companies from which
street vendors gather their supplies, but in any case, musicians, DJs or record labels aren’t
involved in the physical production or distribution of these albums. This is a very important
point because it helps to understand the networked and highly distributed value chain that
sustains tecnobrega. This media ecology (Fuller, 2005) is comprised of a large number of
independent actors and elements, which in some case establish tactical alliances and in some
55 A clear example of this is Britney Spear’s “Womanizer”, which has been re-mixed by tecnobrega DJs
http://www.goear.com/listen/08d1a08/womanizer-versao-tecnobrega-britney-spears or Akon’s “Be
with you” remixed by DJ Narciso http://www.goear.com/listen/58a3324/be-with-you-akon-
tecnobrega-dj-narciso (Last Accessed February 2012).
56 Literally “camels”.
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cases just complement each other and contribute to produce, distribute and promote
tecnobrega.
These street vendors, who are directly linked to the bands and in some cases to the DJs, never
establish any formal contracts, or have any kind of economic relationship with the bands. They
are usually acquainted with the musicians and they help to promote their music by giving them
visibility in their stores. These street vendors are extremely important as they spread the music
around the cities, they help to establish some bands by placing them in visible places or
recommending them amongst their buyers. Word of mouth is really important and the camelos
are key figures on a street level. This leads us to understand one of the most striking aspects of
tecnobrega, as it has no interest or links with big record labels, or corporate structures. This fact
proves how a whole music scene can function without any kind of acknowledgment of the
workings of intellectual property; bands and DJs just use samples and re-mix material without
ever paying any kind of rights. Most of the bands directly appropriate fragments or sounds from
popular pop records. In some cases they translate international hits into Portuguese, in others
they simple re-write the base and rhythm lines and they play them to the original score. The
results are highly recognizable choruses combined with a techno-sounding background, English
and Portuguese combined lyrics and a pervasive rhythm line. These bands do not have any
interest in intellectual property as they combine and re-mix other hits, street vendors copy these
home-recorded albums and sell them. The fact that there are not rights involved in this scene
allows for the wide circulation of this music, anybody can make copies of the records and
records themselves include fragments of other songs. This promotes the generation of a
distributed income chain. Bands make a living from live gigs, vendors from selling copies.
Parasites parasitizing other parasites or virtuous value chains?
André, who is an anthropologist but has for the last few years worked in social programmes
aimed at offering opportunities to youths from deprived areas through music related activities,
described some of the problems and abnormalities that tecnobrega musicians face. Even if we
acknowledge that tecnobrega was at the peak of its popularity, musicians shared a certain
pessimism about the role they played in this complex ecosystem. Some bands have made it
pretty big and play regularly on TV shows and benefit from media exposure but in general,
bands can’t live from live music. They generate the tracks that later DJs re-mix at the big parties,
but the number of live gigs has declined in comparison to the number of tecnobrega parties. We
need to put this into context as the number of live performances in Belem shares no similarity
to any other cultural context I have studied so far. In their report, Lemos & Castro write that
“there are almost 1700 live gigs per month (…) and 4300 parties per month” (2008:162) in a city
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of 1.5 million inhabitants. These figures have not always been this way as when “brega” 57 began
live performances were far more numerous than DJ parties. These bands now produce the raw
material that DJs play and re-mix at the large parties named “aparelhagens”. As André points
out “musicians now have to play almost every day in order to make the profits they made less
than ten years ago. This puts a lot of strain on band members who usually have other jobs and
on occasions find it tough to follow this pace. Many bands re-combine and share different
names in order to play more often”. We could argue that these bands are far from stable
formations and function more as networks that re-combine constantly in order to access more
gigs and be present in more places. Most musicians know each other or have played together in
some band or another. This generates a quite dense network of musicians that in many cases
don’t aspire to become well- known, but instead work closely with concert promoters in order
to play live with certain frequency. Some of these bands have a strong brand identity whilst
many will just use a name for a limited number of gigs to later change their name or recombine
with other musicians into a new band. This creates a whole new logic to the music scene in
which novelty is perceived as a good attribute by gig-goers, willing to experience new bands
every time. This reality jeopardizes the traditional business models, completely opening-up new
ways of understanding the economics of music. Branding loses importance, again intellectual
property, or trademarks have little to do with the logics that define this scene. It would be
interesting to see how the dependence on live performances instead of expecting revenues from
record sales alters the dynamics of the music scene in the long run. We can’t gather data on this
as not enough time has passed, but it would help us to understand the future of the music
industry. We should look at how these musicians endure the rigors of playing live almost every
day, on occasions playing twice a day, as this can become one of the threats to the sustainability
of the sector in the long run.
It’s quite shocking to hear how the music studies actually function. It is easy to understand the
notion of “cottage industry” that defines this scene. Studios literally consist of a back room in
someone’s house in which a synthesizer and bass guitar had been hooked into a computer that
run (an illegal version of) Protools. Bundles of wires and cables hang from the ceiling and illegal
electricity and internet connections are shared with neighbours. The notion of unstable
infrastructure becomes relevant in this context. The best way bands have to promote their music
is by handing their records out to DJs and hoping that they will play them during one of the
parties. This gives place to an interesting paradox; even though bands complain about the
progressive importance DJs are acquiring on the music scene, they depend heavily upon them in
57Brega is a musical style from which tecnobrega stems-off. It consists of very catchy and cheesy songs
characterized by extremely romantic lyrics, played by big ensembles, including brass bands, several
singers and large rhythm sections.
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order to introduce their music into the market. In many cases street vendors will provide more
copies of a certain CD if the songs it contains have been played recently by a famous DJ. In
many cases these DJs are related to the owners of the “aparelhagems”, that is, the sound systems
that host the tecnobrega parties. Possibly, these aparelhagems are the most spectacular element of
the whole scene. The bigger ones include digital visual displays, giant screens, massive speakers
that make deafening sounds, lights, firework systems, special laser effects, stroboscopic lighting,
frantic professional dancing etc. Discussing the importance of these aparelhagems with Pedro
Lasch, a Mexican born visual artist and scholar who has studied the Sonideros 58 movement in
Mexico City, he proposed an interesting way of thinking about these massive sound systems. In
a private conversation he commented that “usually foreign scholars seem to analyze these
cultural events from a folk point of view, trying to explain how these sound systems stem from
the traditional street parties. I have been working to show how this doesn’t help to understand
them, as technically these elements are far more sophisticated than the systems used in Europe
or the United States in concerts or big events. What we are seeing is a different tradition of
techno music which has grown in parallel to the European scene and that technologically is far
more advanced. Sometimes scholars are reluctant to accept that these musical movements don’t
develop from popular culture, but constitute a new genre of digital music”. The fact is that these
aparelhagems are far more complex and contain more visual and technical elements than the
systems used in advanced music festivals, like the Sonar Festival in Barcelona (although, visually
they can be misleading, as the “cheesiness” of the images they beam out can be a bit confusing).
The technological complexity is overshadowed by the visuals displayed during the shows.
Aparelhagems are usually owned and managed by families, the head of the household (always a
male figure) being the owner of the system. He later employs other members of the family in
order to repair, set up and work with these complex technical machines and in many cases the
DJs are relatives, in most cases younger sons. The economic structures that define aparelhagems
are always a combination of formal and informal transactions and agreements that can change
easily depending on the size of the event and the attendance. The bigger the system the more
close to the formal economy these become. But not all aparelhagems are big - there can be
medium sized and small systems, and the degree of sophistication displayed can vary
considerably. Smaller systems don’t usually move from neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the
city. In the case of medium sized systems, we see a combination of technological equipment,
usually less sophisticated than in the case of bigger systems, which they supplement with other
elements, such as the prestige of the DJs, the networks established with other actors of the
58Sonideros constitute a similar cultural phenomenon that takes place in Mexico. These are big street
parties in which sound systems, or sonidos, are erected in which DJs play re-mixed music to very large
audiences at parties that can go on for several days. As in the case of tecnobrega, there is a very big
investment in sound systems that pass from generation to generation.
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scene or a very important know-how. These small and medium sized aparelhagems are extremely
important in order to understand the tecnobrega ecosystem as they are usually more accessible
and work closer with local musicians, enabling newcomers to access the music scene and obtain
certain visibility. These small and medium systems are more innovative in the music they play
and the different genres they help to establish. Bigger systems, although visually and in sound
terms more sophisticated, are usually more conservative in the kinds of music they host. In all
cases, these aparelhagems are constantly introducing new features and equipment, in order to
become more competitive and as one informant told me, “there is a constant competition
among aparelhagems, in order to become more important and display new elements: flat screens,
new light effects, bigger speakers, etc. Promoters like to work with aparelhagems that change
constantly, they even hold parties in order to show the novelties introduced into their
equipment”.
Fans know the different aparelhagems well, but usually they decide which party to attend
depending on which DJ is playing tunes. Symbolically DJs are becoming increasingly important
and they are as significant for the success of the party as are all the sound and visual effects that
characterize these sound systems. The materiality of these massive technological artefacts
combines with the symbolic dimension brought in by DJs in order to determine the relevance of
a given aparelhagem. The combination of these two factors gives place to the location where a
great part of the value of tecnobrega is produced, as it is in these parties where bigger economic
transactions take place. Audiences pay a small fee to attend, they have drinks in the improvised
bars or purchase CDs from the different bands being played. The success of these parties can
only be understood because of the amazing number of people they manage to attract.59 Prices
are relatively low but people just seem to pour into the place making these events highly
lucrative enterprises. Surrounding the party there are also a large congregation of street vendors
selling CDs, and even some drink and food stalls, generating an open economy that returns back
to the local communities. In the case of the medium and small aparelhagems this is even clearer
as the owners of the systems, the DJs and musicians belong to the community, so these events
contribute not only to building alternative economies, but also to strengthening relations and
creating bonds between people from the same locations.
To set up these parties, a heavy investment is needed. The promoter or “festeiro” is one of the
most important actors in order to understand the social and economic structure that defines
tecnobrega. I personally couldn’t interview or get to know any festeiros and all the information I
59Figures differ from one party to another, and depend on the size and location of the aparelhagem,, but
a small one can attract from a couple of hundred to one thousand people. A medium one, usually up to
three or four thousand people. In the case of the big ones, it can be up to twelve or fifteen thousand
fans.
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gathered about them comes from secondary sources. These promoters hire the “casas de festa”,
or spaces in which the parties take place, pay the aparelhagem owners, take care of the public
licenses, hire private security and staff the parties. They also buy the drinks, mostly beer, that are
sold during the parties (according to Lemos & Castro, they can sell from 5,000 to 15,000 boxes
of beer in one single event (Lemos & Castro, 2008:100), and this constitutes one of the most
important ways of obtaining returns from their investment, which is usually about R$22,000 per
party60 (Lemos & Castro, 2008:106). Festeiros are usually the actors that obtain the biggest
economic benefits in the tecnobrega value chain, so we could argue that they have become the
biggest parasites in the system. Looking deeper into this figure, we can see how they also
contribute to the maintenance of the scene, as they not only pay the aparelhagem owners, who
then pay the DJs who play the music composed by the bands, who then gain visibility, but also
invest in the technologies and tools used by the aparelhagems. They usually come to an agreement
with the festeiros who will purchase new elements and then organize a party to show these new
acquisitions. Festeiros will usually take a bigger cut from these presentation parties but help to
build the reputations of the different aparelhagems and contribute to feed the innovation race in
which they all compete. At the same time, festeiros pay licences and fees to the city authorities in
order to organize parties, contributing to formalizing the scene. Using Serre’s ideas, we could
easily argue that I have been describing what so far constitutes a “parasitic cascade” (Serres,
2007:4).
The last but by no means least important figure in this ecosystem is constituted by the audiences
and fans that attend the parties and concerts. We could divide these into two different groups
depending on their relationship with the scene: average fans and super fans. Super fans are
organized groups of tecnobrega followers known as equipes61. They follow specific bands or DJs,
and they all dress similarly which makes them highly recognizable as usually on their t-shirts,
caps, beer buckets or other items, one can read the name of their equipe. These teams are
influential as they can mobilize a large number of fans and decide what party to attend or which
DJ should be supported and who is out of fashion. Some of these groups are relatively small
(about three or four members), but others seem to gather up to thirty or forty members. These
equips talk with the DJs, request specific tracks and, on occasions, pay their favourite bands to
compose songs for them. This can become an interesting source of income for bands who will
charge more or less depending on the closeness and friendship that they have developed with
these super fans. When one of these songs gets played at a party, equips become bonded with
the DJ and they will later follow and promote that specific DJ elsewhere. In this sense, these
organized groups of fans establish symbiotic relations with the aparelhagems, as they gather their
60 Approximately 8,565.36 GBP
61
For an ethnographical account of the equipes and fans see Domb, 2009.
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symbolic recognition from the DJs, but at the same time, they become opinion makers, and
move fans into specific parties or events.
This way live performances and the aparelhagems are not only the place in which the audience can
see their favourite bands and DJs, but more importantly, constitute the spaces where the bonds
between musicians and fans become close and are enacted. During the performances DJs shout
out the names of the fans who request songs or friends to whom the musicians are grateful.
These names are also displayed on the screens and each time one of these names appears you
can hear a group of people shouting and celebrating the recognition. Near the stage there is a
constant flow of people handing out pieces of paper with song requests, names, messages, etc.
that a member of the aparelhagems collects and then hands out to the singer or DJs. This helps to
create strong bonds between the audience and the musicians. What one clearly sees during the
concerts is a process of participation in which the audience becomes an active part of the
concert and helps to shape the event by requesting music, writing messages to be read out loud
or by interacting with the musicians via their dances and comments. In this sense, the
environment that is created differs completely from traditional concerts in which the audiences
hardly play a part in the definition of the event. In this case, the audience acts as a social
commons from which the bands feed but at the same time, which the bands help to produce.
There is a constant feedback loop (economic, social, symbolic, affective) between the bands and
DJs, and their audiences. The super-fans achieve their social recognition from the bands, while
the bands benefit from these super-fans that chant, sing out loud and help to promote concerts.
The bands give away their music (via Bluetooth) and the fans celebrate this act of generosity
through their fidelity to the bands. The fans shape the nature of the gigs and have a say in the
structure of the events, whilst the bands provide the context for the fans to gather and share
experiences. Again, it’s difficult to locate the parasite in these commons.
Although tecnobrega constitutes an interesting example of a completely different way of
conceiving the production of culture, by no means should we take it as a blueprint to building
an alternative to the creative industries. First we should pay attention to some of the problems
that appear in this model. To do so I will flag-up what I consider three important issues that
need to be discussed. To begin with, we have already seen how this model that depends heavily
on live events has imposed a toll on musicians who feel the strains of having to perform almost
every night in order to make a living. This frantic activity is not easy to sustain, especially for
ageing artists who find it difficult to follow this pace. This fact can help us to understand some
of the consequences that the change of a product-based model to a performance-based
economic model can have on musicians and bands. On the other hand, a very important
problem worth considering is the absence of women in this sector. In most cases the women
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have a supporting role and hardly have any presence in decision making or in the points in the
value chain in which economic transactions are made. Most of the women present in this sector
are members of the bands, and more specifically, work as dancers for the aparelhagems. These
kinds of jobs are far from being secure and they are highly volatile, as in many cases the owners
decide to change dancers every time they introduce technological novelties in their sound
systems. Another important aspect to consider is the fact that there aren’t any female festeiros,
that is, the promoters, who are the most important actors in the economic chain are all men.
The absence of women in the power structures is clear at all levels, but especially in the places in
which bigger sums of money can be made.
Lemos and Castro’s research into the economic model that sustains tecnobrega provides some
interesting figures. They argue that this music movement has created about 6,552 jobs, including
musicians, organizers, investors, DJs, and street vendors. The amount of revenue these different
actors can make varies considerably, as street vendors can make about 1,228BRL, approximately
£480 (Lemos & Castro, 2008:138) whilst bands can make about 3,283BRL, approximately
£1,280, per month (Lemos & Castro, 2008:164). The fact that so many different agents
contribute to shaping the ecology of tecnobrega, and that so many of its activities take place in
informal markets, makes it difficult to define the true economic impact caused by tecnobrega.
But without doubt, it constitutes a considerable source of income for many families that – we
must remember – live in a rather impoverished area of Brazil.. Far from wanting to prove that
this model constitutes a viable alternative to the decaying creative industries that I have analyzed
in the previous chapters of this work, I am interested in showing how these self-organized
ecosystems can prove to be more resilient and provide more distributed income chains than
more traditional models.
All the elements that constitute the chain of value of tecnobrega I have introduced up to this
point generate benefits or have a direct impact on the local communities and neighbourhoods of
Belém. But there is also a substantial element of this chain that has nothing to do with the city,
or even with Brazil, which has helped to spread the movement, promote the artists, and
generate stronger bonds between DJs and fans: the social network Orkut. Owned by Google
and hosted in California, this is the most popular social networking site in Brazil. This is the
place where fans discuss the latest albums and parties, organize attending a certain event, share
tracks and rate DJs and bands. This mega-parasite has nothing to do with the local scene,
although it would be impossible to understand the dynamics that have shaped tecnobrega
without acknowledging its existence. Orkut captures part of the value generated by the music
scene but also contributes to generate value as it provides a powerful infrastructure for bands to
interact with their fans because it helps to distribute music beyond the reach of the camelos and
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provides a space where super-fans can organize and share information. Although recently, for
legal reasons, Google Brazil located in Belo Horizonte took over the management of the site,
this in any case does not imply a direct economic return to Belém.
It is hard to define who is the parasite and who is being parasitized in the chain of relations that
I have just described. We could add a layer of complexity to this diagram if we included the
whole of Belém that as a parasite feeds and benefits from the existence of tecnobrega. The
externalities produced by this music scene are difficult to determine and to measure. Using his
linear parasitical model, Matteo Pasquinelli has tried to argue that when the creative industries
provide wealth to the cities in which they grow these cities become economic parasites of the
symbolic capital generated by cultural workers. He uses the example of Barcelona, as he argues
that “in the early 2000s the connection between real-estate economy and the driver of cultural
capital was clear. The success of the city as an international brand is not merely a gift of nature,
but relies upon its cultural and social heritage that today is fuelled by a new cosmopolitan and
alternative culture. In fact, such collective production of a symbolic but still common resource is
exploited first and foremost by real-estate speculators”(Pasquinelli, 2008:116). He uses this idea
to define how gentrification works defining a clear and linear model in which “the condition of
the creative workers (and of the whole society) becomes a vicious circle: they produce symbolic
value for the real-estate business that perpetually squeezes them (as they suffer the housing
prices and often face eviction)” (Pasquinelli, 2008:121). In the case of tecnobrega, and this could
be inferred in many other cases, I find it difficult to apply this linear analysis model, as the
region of Pará has received notoriety and become popular thanks to tecnobrega. It would be
difficult to define what elements present in the social demography have favoured and
encouraged the whole phenomenon to take place. The same logic could be applied to other
cities. Following the example of Barcelona provided by Pasquinelli, it would be hard to define
how the brand, “being from Barcelona”, has influenced a number of musicians, artists or
activists, such as Pasquinelli, to raise their social profile. The parasite keeps changing sides, as
Serres argues, “systems oscillate and parasites keep moving positions” (Serres, 2007:53). The
more detailed the cultural system, the more we see a set of different relations emerging between
its different agents. In the case of tecnobrega this becomes very clear, as the levels of co-
dependency and interaction are so thick and function at so many different levels, it would be
difficult to establish who exploits who. The whole system depends on appropriating tunes from
other artists; parasitism gives rise to symbiogenesis (Margulis, 1991) and exploitation and
cooperation seem to be two sides of the same process. Pasquenielli’s critique functions only as
far as one believes that economics just should deal with monetary transactions, an idea
discredited by many authors (see Graeber, 2011).
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The externalities derived from tecnobrega undoubtedly reach many different areas, street food
and drink vendors, camelos, local councils, t-shirt makers, beer industries etc. These decentralized
value chains generate distributed returns to a very large number of agents involved directly or
indirectly in the system. They all play significant roles in the scene, from the kid that rides his
bike with a loudspeaker attached advertising a party, to the festeiro who invests in large parties, to
the DJs and music bands. The lack of intellectual property has helped to avoid false monopolies
and to spread the music beyond the limit range of record sales. Fans have used corporate owned
social networks to organize, promote events, and create communities around the music scene.
The owners of the small and medium aparelhagems have helped to introduce social cohesion and
economic returns into downgraded social areas. Big aparelhagems ensure the livelihood of bands
and DJs who have become national stars. With Serres we could argue that “the parasite parasites
the parasites. In other words, any given position in the model is parasitic” (Serres, 2007:55). This
propitiates the emergence of a generative scene able to produce more economic returns than
any other public scheme or organized cultural strategy. The creative industries, with their focus
on individual creativity and intellectual property, can do nothing in the face of such powerful
cultural scenes.
Conclusions: Parasites and Parasites
As seen in the previous chapter, we see again here the creation of a series of unstable
infrastructures that allow a whole music scene to emerge. This model has grown far away from
promotional schemes, intellectual property regimes, cultural entrepreneurship, as defined by
governmental bodies, or policies to encourage development born with the creative industries.
Despite this fact, it has managed to build a distributed business model in which thousands of
agents are involved that manages to benefit directly local communities. Instead of promoting
individualized cultural agents, this music scene relies heavily on strong communities and bonds
between musicians and fans62. These strong networks and unstable infrastructures have
contributed to transform tecnobrega into one of the most important successes in Brazilian
music.
If the creative industries were characterized, as we have seen in previous chapters, by their
ability to build strong infrastructures that allow the production, reproduction and distribution of
cultural objects, tecnobrega shows another way of understanding the production of these
infrastructures. Instead of being composed of promotional schemes, funding agencies, policies,
corporate networks and a combination of private agreements, these new infrastructures are
62This does not imply that individualized agents take part of this process as is the case of the DJs, who
can capture and exploit more symbolic capital than other actors in this network.
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composed of a network of informal agreements, networks of trust and common resources.
These infrastructures, which are highly unstable as they are dependent on a large number of
contingent elements, differ from stable cultural infrastructures in that they are common
infrastructures that can be used by a large number of agents. They are open. You can tap into
and benefit from these infrastructures in many different places and stages. From the illegal
internet connection that gives access to pirated mp3 tracks, to the music studios to the loans
aimed at buying new material that festeiros grant aparelhagem owners, this informal system could
crack at any moment; its openness is also a sign of its instability.
Unstable infrastructures can cut across cities, regions and even countries and erase the
boundaries that define corporate and cottage production. As we have seen they consist in a set
of complex interactions between corporate entities such as Google through their social
networking site Orkut, street vendors, international artists such as Britney Spears and super fans
who, through their actions generate intersecting spheres of value and overlapping spheres of
exchange (Bloch and Parry, 1989). The awareness that there is a shared resource and co-
produced productive infrastructures propitiate that we analyze this scene as a form of commons
rather than as an example of an informal economy. Again, the openness of the infrastructures is
the key element to understand the strength of this system and not so much the different degrees
of formality that sustains it.
These channels, tools, informal contracts, tracks and re-mixes are the commons of peripheral
cultural production. The lack of enforcement of intellectual property, or the lack of ownership
over music enables the appearance of a parasitic chain that is capable of generating a
sophisticated production and distribution system. The relations between the different agents
that constitute this system are so enmeshed and the levels of co-dependency so high, that
parasitism gives place to symbiogenetic relations. There is a constant oscillation from parasitism
to symbiogenetic relations and back. All agents contribute to establish this value chain, and in
different degrees they all benefit from it. Local communities benefit largely from this scene and
investors do, as money constitutes just one of the forms of value generated throughout this
process. This does not imply that with Terranova we shouldn’t discuss free labour: digital
platforms capture time and energy put in by implicit and explicit participants. But at the same
time, we have seen how the labour put into some of these networks can also return to local
scenes. Super-fans meet and discuss music on Orkut, they share music and organize which
specific parties to attend. There is a double parasite, the corporate owners benefit from the
activity that takes place in the platforms but also aparelhagem owners who become popular thanks
to these sites. In a strange twist Orkut carries and benefits from the existence of pirated goods.
Festeiros benefit from the success of certain aparelhagems in which they invest. DJs get paid by
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festeiros. DJs play the music composed by the bands who, if they become popular, get to play
concerts from which they also earn their income. Camelos sell CDs from popular bands to the
fans who discuss music on Orkut. The parasite keeps moving, the system keeps oscillating. This
doesn’t imply that all the relations are fair, or that there are no levels of exploitation to examine,:
the lack of women in this productive pyramid is notorious, but possibly we need more
sophisticated tools to understand the kinds of relations established in complex systems. But we
can also see that the ability to create common infrastructures contributes to produce, distributed
markets and more sources of wealth. The notion of rent, central to the Marxist critique of the
economy of culture, is present and a necessary tool to understand a specific kind of transactions
that take place, but it fails to describe the full complexity of the contexts it defines. It helps to
highlight the inequalities and difference levels in which actors can monetize social value, but
fails to show the concomitant sphere of value that take place. Rent helps us to understand the
uneven distribution of money, but if we are to challenge the idea that economics only deal with
money transactions, the Parasite helps us to become aware of the different spheres of value that
take place and symbolic forms exchanges that constitute them. Rent is about formalized
transactions, the Parasite highlights the circulation of recognition, symbolic value, affects, debts,
favours etc. Rents take place inside parasitic systems, but constitute just a part of them.
Tecnobrega is not a blueprint for the future of the creative industries but it helps us to
understand the complexity of economic and cultural systems. We must not forget that these
productive ecosystems are fragile and are constantly under threat from international intellectual
property regulatory bodies, trade agreements, urban policies, safety regulations63 etc. All these
can constitute important obstacles to the growth of these dynamic production systems. In any
moment international music corporations could try to sue these bands for using samples of
copyrighted music, international corporations could lobby in order to get the Brazilian
government to enforce more restrictive intellectual property frameworks, trade agreements
could put limits to the goods Brazil exports to compensate the possible loses derived from the
widespread pirating of films, music and software or local governments could introduce health
and safety regulations aimed at stopping live gigs and the introduction of aparelhagems in public
spaces. All these threats can put the resilience of these models to the test. The European
creative industries models are based on closing sources of income along the system to guarantee
that profits are generated solely on the top of the pyramid. As we have seen along this work, a
set of artificial measures have been enforced in order to achieve this, intellectual property being
the most visible one. As in the case of Free Software, peripheral cultural production functions
completely differently, allowing parasites to tap in and become part of any point of the system.
63In this sense we could compare how the rave scene that took place in the UK in the late eighties and
early nineties was destroyed by heavy policing and health and safety regulations among other factors.
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We see that the European model is clearly in decline, whilst peripheral cultural production has
by no means achieved its full potential; many more parasites will emerge, more systems will
become forked, turbulences are still to come. Rents show us forms of inequality in the system,
the Parasite shows us the system.
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Chapter Eight.
Conclusions
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‘It’s a Holiday in Cambodia’
The Dead Kennedys
The aim I set out when I started this work was to analyze, critique and provide a theoretical
framework that could engage with and depict the creative industries beyond the formalist
accounts of the prevailing literature that currently exists on this subject. In order to do so, I have
produced what we could call a political economy of the creative industries, that is, an
investigation of the material, symbolic and social conditions that determine contemporary
cultural production. With my work I have shown the limitations, problems and tensions derived
from the normative models promoted by public discourses and agencies and shown a detailed
and complex sphere in which desires, interests, discourses and practices converge and collide.
This work has discussed how a model devised as a progressive economic development scheme
capable of substituting for the decaying industrial economy in Western cities––which were being
hit hard by neoliberal policies and the relocation of production to cheaper and less regulated
countries––has become a powerful tool to privatize and commodify collective ideas and
common forms of knowledge. In this sense I have portrayed a dense network of discourses,
agencies, promotion plans, incubators, funds and investment schemes, laboratories, clubs and
public and private organizations that over almost thirty years have produced a specific idea and
model of how the creative industries should be and function. The creative industries appeared in
the midst of a speculative bubble and adopted most of the traits and characteristics associated to
this hype. Throughout the previous chapters I have argued that we cannot understand the
political dimensions of the creative industries if we do not fully grasp the neoliberal context in
which they were forged, and a great part of this work has been devoted to do just that.
In parallel I have shown how many factors have contributed to the public decline of the
promotion of the creative industries as a strategic economic sector in Western countries: the fact
that these never accomplished the figures and growth estimates its promoters set out to achieve,
the instability of the employment they created, the important levels of gender and ethnic
minority based discrimination present in the sector, the concentration of these enterprises in
large cities and lack of results in non-urban areas, the inability these enterprises have to create
employment (as opposed to self-employment), or the astonishing amount of self-exploitation
that takes place in this field. The discourses that promote the creative industries have supported
and relied on their ability to create social justice (rebranded under the more acceptable notion of
development), but as we have seen through my fieldwork, this has not been always the case.
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I have depicted the creative industries as normative business models based on the private
extraction of social wealth, a set of economic configurations designed to tap into and capture
ideas, trends, words, images and sounds produced through complex non-linear social
interactions. The creative industries live from imposing scarcity on abundance. To demonstrate
this, I have discussed the importance of intellectual property as a techno-political mechanism
devised to restrict access to, and enable the appropriation of, the ideas and flows of knowledge
that I have described as cultural commons. In this sense the creative industries have been
described as entities whose aim is to singularize that which is common, to impose authorship on
collective constellations of meaning, to actualize and commoditize virtual flows of meaning.
Throughout the work I have also showed how on the margins of the public development
agencies, circumventing the official discourses and schemes, and in some cases, alien to this
normative framework, we can find multiple ways in which people devise strategies and models
that enable them to produce culture. These economic formations display multiple levels of
engagement with the models put forward by policy makers and operate and produce their own
spaces. I have interrogated and analyzed examples of these different configurations in order to
provide a more complex depiction of the ways in which culture and economy become
entangled. I have portrayed and discussed ways in which collectives, self-organizations and
cultural agents have managed to generate their own infrastructures of production and
distribution. These realities which I have defined as unstable and precarious, help us to track
ecosystems in which multiple spheres of value collide and operate simultaneously; they help us
see how the circulation of cultural goods runs parallel to non-economic transactions. Chains of
favours, networks of trust, non-economic exchanges, debts, systems of recognition, etc. interact
with markets and technological devices to produce these unstable infrastructures, which are able
to cross markets and communities, articulate political and cultural projects, and allow specific
institutional arrangements that otherwise couldn’t take place.
Underlying this whole work we see how a tension arises in which categories such as public or
private become blurred and difficult to defend. We have seen how sets of policies, agencies,
institutions and discourses that have been promoted by public entities were aiming at
progressively privatizing cultural production. We have also discussed the appearance of cultural
enterprises whose market niche is the declining state and its institutions. We cannot understand
the appearance of the creative industries if we do not keep this public-private tension in mind.
With my fieldwork I have contributed to demonstrate that if we look carefully into the different
organizations that live under the notion of the creative industries we find multiple economic
204
configurations taking place. In occasions some of these projects have developed business
structures that resemble NGOs, that is, private organizations that carry out public activities. In
others, we have seen how they have set out to capture those flows of knowledge and forms of
invention produced in the midst of what has been branded “creative basins”, privatizing these
common goods. In order to go beyond the public-private dispute, I have introduced the notion
of the commons, understood as a productive and generative economic reality that challenges the
supposed autonomy of the market and the state and introduces forms of hybridity. The
commons intersect with different markets where work and ideas become monetized but also
need to engage with the state as a regulatory framework and normative space. I have argued that
to think through the prism of the commons is to rethink assumptions that have been
normalized in contemporary economic discourses. Ideas such as property, competition or value
need to be reconsidered to understand the economic formations that are bred under the
commons.
I have also depicted the commons as spaces prone to give birth to forms of self-organization.
These can crystallize in protocols, norms or customs that can be constantly negotiated but that
are never enforced by public institutions and elude private interests. We have seen how the
creative industries were promoted by public agencies and discourses that encourage the
privatization of common goods, in this sense, the public-private dichotomy collapses into a
complex system of interactions and dynamics. Neither of the two categories is completely stable,
they both keep re-addressing each other. I have described how neoliberalism aims at limiting the
powers of the state in order to give powers to the market. The creative industries perceive the
commons as an open space, an accessible source of knowledge and inventions. The commons
are structured through norms and protocols aimed at ensuring their continuity, these are forms
of regulation developed by the the community of people engaged with the commons If
neoliberal agendas are looking to produce smooth spaces and opening-up resources, in order to
be grabbed and turned into private assets, the commons function as striated spaces. These
striations, rules or protocols do not become totally crystallized, they are not public norms, they
are flexible and can easily be altered. These are forms engendered in contexts of self-regulation
that give place to instituting processes; they prevent the “tragedy of the commons” by excluding
and redefining access rights. In some cases these protocols will become engrained in stable
regulatory frameworks. We saw this in the case of the free software movement and its smart use
of existing laws in order to define the norms that define its use and economic exploitation. In
other cases, these norms are built organically by communities in order to regulate their time, to
provide visibility of the forms of value that emerge in non-linear modes of work. Trust
networks, tacit agreements, exchange protocols, karma ratings, etc., all take place producing
205
numerous overlapping systems of value. These are informal practices that become formalized
through the ability of the communities who adopt them, to define their own productive
parameters and norms. Between the public and the private, the informal and formal economies,
these commons-based economies emerge and redefine rules and practices.
Another issue that has become apparent through this work is that the process in which artists,
designers, musicians, collectives, etc. have become entangled with the discursive or institutional
networks in which they have been encouraged to become “enterprises” has by no means been
frictionless. Through the different interviews I have conducted I have been able to encounter
different forms of agency born from these entanglements. The interaction of these subjects
with formal and institutional schemes has favoured certain forms of organization, structures of
power, uses of technologies, systems of value, distribution channels, consumption cycles, etc.,
but also specific subjectivities have emerged from these encounters, these feed from and need to
manage elements such a forms of imagination, language, memory, affect, etc. These different
combinations have produced very specific subjectivities in which anxieties, desires, hopes, forms
of refusal, identifications and fear have become central elements. It is in these pockets of agency
in which we see how contradictions and forms of ambivalence are fully present. These help us
understand the limitations and forms of antagonism towards the hegemonic discourses that I
have been able to portray.
Some concepts have important roles to play in the shaping of these different subjectivities and
in controlling the refusal of certain institutional models. Throughout this work I have
subscribed ideas put forward by a number of authors who suggest creativity constitutes an
apparatus, a carefully crafted technology able to guarantee the continuity of cultural work.
Alongside other notions such as authenticity, coolness or happiness at work, I have tried to
expose how these apparatus function and their importance in forging the subjectivity of cultural
workers. I have defined this “pleasure in work” as a protocolary formation, a technology aimed
at governing bodies, a set of discourses, dispositions and forms of governance produced in
order to regulate production. Self-realization and happiness at work are parts of these systems of
control and discipline of the body. These discursive elements confront and try to contain the
harsh realities of cultural work, they overshadow stress, flexibility, discontinuity and precarity;
while pleasure at work helps to overcome alienation. Following post-autonomist authors we
have discussed how frustration, boredom or exhaustion can trigger the search for new forms of
subjectivity, exodus from the factory and a quest for autonomy.
206
The tensions derived from work affect the body that seeks to escape containment. The intensity
of the tensions work produces on the body generates a quest for new forms of being. If pleasure
at work is a re-elaboration and normativization of desire, the refusal of work opens up spaces
for collective organization, enabling the rearticulation of bodies with productive aims. This is
the reason why it is so difficult to break through the dichotomy work-pleasure, as creativity
provides a space in which to channel the frustrations generated by work. Creativity is the
normalized subjective disposition produced in order that frustrated workers cope with work.
But it also constitutes an apparatus of capture, it provides a gateway to all the desires, feelings,
inventions and emotions the workers carry with them. Creativity and authenticity open channels
between the enterprise and the cultural commons. They allow those aspects of the subjectivity
of the worker that were previously banned from the workplace to be present, it enables capture.
Pleasure at work prevents the exodus of workers, prevents the fulfilment of desire and life
outside the workplace.
This way we see that the raw material the creative industries feed on is a combination of ideas,
thoughts, signs, languages, etc. but also affects, desires, personalities and fears. In this context,
creativity, happiness or authenticity constitute gateways that enable industrial production to
capture social production. The notion of “social factory” as defined by post-autonomous
thinkers has helped us to define this new productive model in which industry and culture are
completely enmeshed. The need to capture social knowledge, the erosion of productive and
non-productive sites or the complex mechanism to monetize abstract knowledge constitute
clear examples of this progressive entanglement of culture and industry. Such interactions can
transform these flows of knowledge into material artefacts that later become mass produced and
distributed. In this sense the artefact named “cultural industry” enables industry to be
understood in terms of social wealth and not surplus value. It allows the articulation of
counterintuitive elements such as trends, tags, colours, sounds, rhymes with printers, pressers,
marketing techniques, shipment codes, patents, boxes and shop shelves. It pairs inventions with
patents. It allows the extraction of value from large sources of wealth.
The debate about material and immaterial labour and production has underlined and punctuated
the current volume. On one level I have acknowledged the progressive de-materialization of
labour, engaging with all the contradictions and debates that have surrounded this issue. On the
other, more interestingly, I have addressed the materiality or thingness of the objects that
207
circulate across the creative industries. As we have seen, on many occasions these are constantly
shifting from one state to the other, becoming momentarily stabilized as a specific commodity
to later re-adopt another form. Virtual elements become constantly actualized. Shared ideas and
forms of knowledge have suddenly become embedded in objects, and sets of policies and
regulations, enable them to become private property. Inventions that take place in the space of
the commons are captured and turned into commodities, ideas have been embedded in tangible
surfaces that are shifted from one country to another. On occasions these objects, characters,
ideas, colours, etc. have become brands, immaterial elements that give birth to more material
objects through their movement across distribution and consumption networks. Some of these
objects become digitalized, modified, remixed, transformed into a different object altogether. A
great portion of the goods generated by the creative industries are turned into waste, those
millions of “ Spice Girls” dolls nobody cared to purchase, thousands of copies of journals that
never went into circulation. These contents become petrified until organic processes destabilize
them again. Lines of code are embedded into plastic surfaces waiting to materialize through
their interaction with other lines of code, their materiality is not apparent until they are executed
and trigger other processes. In this sense the dichotomy material-immaterial should be read as a
constant process of transition, the products of the creative industries are constantly in-between
these two states, escaping one to go into the other. Knowledge that becomes stabilized
temporarily as information that later becomes disembedded and returns into circulation.
Intellectual property temporarily stabilizes constellations of information. These are the complex
parameters these things occupy.
This work has helped me to describe the creative industries as a field of tensions. Far from the
normalized depiction of this reality, I have portrayed a dynamic set of interactions and frictions
between different modes of being and production. I have also discussed a growing tension that
take place in this reality in which protocols need to be constantly negotiated through affects. If
protocols are the rules, policies, regulatory frameworks, official networks, institutions, legislation
and institutional agreements that shape the growth of the creative industries we can define an
affective field of expression, intensities, inventiveness and desire that interacts with these
protocols.. If by affects I am referring to the virtual of the creative industries, intensive spaces in
which ideas, sounds, colours and words collide, by protocol I am talking about the actual
conditions and elements these inventions will encounter on their way towards industrialization.
Protocols are formal dispositions, they always incorporate forms of control, they include deontic
operators, and they shape and define behaviour. On the opposite side, expression refuses to be
contained, it is by definition excessive, overflows regulations and bifurcates into new ideas and
articulations of knowledge. We can place the different models of production of culture in the
208
clashes between these two realities. Practices that escape the discourses that try to stabilize and
define them. Cultural movements that overflow the limits provided by policies and public
schemes aimed at regulating them. Spaces in which agency resists the power of discourse. I have
depicted this ambivalent situation through the numerous interviews carried out for this work,
seeing how some cultural workers refused to become entrepreneurs or practices mismatched the
regulations that tried to promote them. It is in these gaps that we see affect operating against
containment, and inventions refusing to transform into innovations.
This unorthodox framework contributes to the appearance of an interesting example of
structural coupling: precarity pairs with infrastructures. Under regimes of flexibility,
discontinuity and the inability to access basic resources on a continued basis, we have detected
how new structural elements have started to emerge. As I have pointed out before, these
infrastructures are not fixed, fully reliable or completely stable, but constitute forms of self-
organization that have emerged in the midst of precarity. These infrastructures are subject to
interruptions, failures and inhabited by noise, heterogeneous elements and glitches. But at the
same these infrastructures can easily be forked, become appropriated and redesigned for other
uses. The plasticity of these infrastructures is what allows them to become common elements.
They become inhabited and used by many different subjects, because of this they can achieve a
vast amount of heterogeneous aims. These emergent infrastructures provide alternatives to the
hegemonic production and distribution channels used by the creative industries, they constitute
shadow technologies that interact and cohabit formal networks and institutions. At the same
time they are frail, unstable and on occasions unreliable. P2P networks are infrastructural
elements that can be extremely robust but also become challenged by regulations, policies and
governmental intervention. The ambivalence of these infrastructures allows them to be
communized and appropriated. Self-institutions, distribution networks, dark networks, all
constitute examples of these unstable infrastructures that enable different regimes of cultural
production. In this work I have looked at some of these infrastructures, some have a highly
technological nature, others rely on chains of human beings, but in most cases they combine
these two elements to different degrees. These infrastructures allow us to understand different
kinds of value chains. Self-regulated exchange or distribution networks lie at the basis of new
forms of economic formations. Enable the growth of what has been described as global
peripheries. Reshape distances and allow ideas to circulate in different ways. We have seen how
some of the infrastructures arise from piracy, to some extent piracy can be understood as an
infrastructural element. What traditional markets consider threats, become basic elements to
understanding these new economies of culture.
209
These infrastructures can become inhabited by all sorts of different agents. In this work I have
looked at these different elements paying special attention to the figure of the cultural
entrepreneur. I have defined entrepreneurship as the normative figure produced by promotion
agencies and public schemes. The creative industries have been built upon this singularized
subject whose aim is to capture flows of knowledge and transform them into cultural
commodities. This discursive figure displays signs and behaviours directly forged by neoliberal
ideologies. I have discussed how the ideas of competition, self-reliance or individuality that
characterize this figure contrast strongly with the ways in which cooperation and communities
are central to the production of the cultural commons. This tension, the need to operate in the
midst of these cultural commons and a tendency towards disembeddedness and
individualization has not only been discussed on a theoretical level, but contrasted with
interviews about the different experiences of cultural workers. This has helped me to think
beyond the cultural entrepreneur and introduce more complex or ambivalent figures. Such is
the case of the parasite, a mutable figure, unstable by definition. Parasites tap into systems, and
by doing so, they create the systems they inhabit. We have seen networks and production
systems that have become robust because of parasites. Instead of closing themselves-in, they
have allowed parasitism to take place. These parasites give place to bifurcations. Introduce non-
linearity. If we saw that the entrepreneur was an opportunist, the parasite opens spaces for
opportunity. This highly ambivalent figure appears to live in the shadows of formalized systems,
but interacts with them opening up new streams of income and access channels. The
entrepreneur has been described as a cynical figure, coping with fear, reinforces the existing
models, plays the game even if he or she knows it is not sustainable over time. The entrepreneur
is linked to risk, in contrast the parasite is closer to uncertainty. It’s a discontinuous figure. The
parasite is always trading places with the parasited. The parasite appears and disappears; it can
emerge in any given moment and given part of the system, opening-up new channels. It is pure
ambivalence, pure mutation. We have seen that the entrepreneur becomes a virtuoso, makes a
living through language, orchestrating discourses. In contrast the parasite is messy, operates in
the realm of noise. The entrepreneur closes, singularizes and privatizes, whilst the parasite opens
spaces for emergence. The parasite is a generative figure that must be taken into account if we
are willing to understand these new economic formations.
Through the figure of the parasite I have also attempted to redefine how we look into the
economic structures that arise around culture. If the Marxist tradition has developed most of its
critique of the creative industries using the notion of rent, the parasite helps us go a step
210
beyond. Rents do take place, but they happen because other forms of exchange are occurring
simultaneously. Some are more formalized, others are not, some are visible others remain
completely invisible. By tapping into these different flows––recognition, symbolic exchanges,
forms of debt, favours, affects, sources of energy and loves or networks of trust––the parasite
unveils the different forms of exchange that allow rent to take place. I consider the parasite a
useful tool to understand the economic spheres of culture that go beyond the limited model
offered by the creative industries. Throughout this work I have identified several bifurcations
and forks that appear in this process. By doing so my aim has not only been to critique the
traditional depictions of the creative industries but also to contribute towards a deeper
understanding of the complexities and realities that constitute the economy of culture. Providing
a theoretical model to analyze this reality but also, by contrasting it with interviews and accounts
of how cultural workers live, I have refuted existing literature and introduced new perspectives
and dimensions to this debate.
Through this work I have exposed the tensions derived from trying to apply a model based on
closure and contention in the midst of a milieu of excess and profusion. We have witnessed the
production of scarcity in a context of abundance. We have discussed business models based on
the need to singularize ideas that have been produced in a milieu of pure invention. The
tensions derived from trying to contain desire into the strict limits of creativity. The growing
distance between models which encourage the individualization of work and those communities
looking for alternatives and ways in which to work together. Gigantic public institutions
overshadowed by small unstable infrastructures, but also regulations that strangle alternative
modes of production. Closed systems of value imposed on common sources of wealth.
Reductive models placed on complex ecosystems. I have discussed the imposition of the
creative industries as the hegemonic way to define the relations between culture and the
economy. But also, by detecting all these mismatches, all the possible spaces in which
bifurcations can appear, all the subjective limitations these models impose, the gaps opened up
between the discourses and the forms of agency they encounter, I hope that I have opened new
spaces for thinking about the production of culture. New ways of conceiving numerous spheres
of value and the forms of social cooperation that sustain them. And finally, I believe that
conceiving inventions as a commons, new exuberant forms of exploiting, engaging and enjoying
culture will emerge providing alternatives to the restrictive and enclosing models imposed by
neoliberal schemes.
211
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