Cursed creatives: alienation,sublimation, and the plight of contemporary creative work

ABSTRACT

This paper connects the critical discourse on the ‘creative class’ with a longstanding lineage of thought on creativity in psychoanalysis, demonstrating their combined value in understanding worker subjectivity and exposing the perils of contemporary creative work. Drawing upon object relations theorizing in particular, the argument is made that the ‘objects’ of contemporary creative work coupled with its surrounding ‘potential space’ prove severely impoverished, giving rise to a newfound experience of alienation. Accounts of creative workers are presented to further elucidate alienation’s unconscious correlates, as well as to suggest ways of mitigating creativity’s compromised expression through the process of ‘sublimation’ – a concept central to the psychoanalytic theorizing on creativity, yet wholly absent from the contemporary discourse. Implications for the critical study of the ‘creative class’ are discussed.     

‘Northernness’, gender and Manchester’s creative industries

This article explores northernness and gender in the context of creative industries in Manchester. I argue that a version of northernness has been mobilised by those within the creative industries and that this identity is strongly linked with masculinity. The article examines the emergence of new creative industries in Manchester from the 1980s onwards. Many of these new creative industries were connected with music and club culture and often prioritised ‘lads’ and their interests. The ‘heritage’ and influence of this seedbed stage of Manchester’s creative industries and the dominant discourses about Manchester’s pop cultural creativity has had a profound influence on the ‘gendering’ of subsequent creative industries in this city. A paradigm of northern ‘laddishness’ pervades the creative sector in Manchester, and this is amplified and sustained by a powerful, media fuelled, cultural identity of the city and its popular culture. A number of local specificities have had an impact on linking creativity to ‘northern’ masculinity in the Manchester case. This has contributed to the ascendency of closed, male-dominated networks in the creative sector. This appears to stand in the way of women’s full access to, and participation in, the city’s creative industries. I suggest that all empirical case studies of creative industries could find value in reflecting on the local context and specificities of place. Using Manchester as a case study, I argue that place-specific identities could productively be explored in debates about exclusion and underrepresentation of women in creative industries.     

Out of the Blue: the dark side of creative enterprise

This paper draws on an archive of media texts that document the making of the film Out of the Blue. Within these media accounts are statements made by a group of residents resisting the film project, and the film‐makers responding to this resistance. We employ a Foucauldian informed discourse analysis to read these statements of resistance as a starting point to examine the power relations within contemporary knowledge generation processes of creative industries. We theorise creative industries as a discursive object located at the intersection of three discursive formations: ‘creativity’, ‘enterprise’ and ‘place’. Through analysing the particular place–identities of Aramoana engaged by the resisting residents and the film‐makers, we are able to suggest how this film project came to be discursively constituted as creative enterprise. In so doing, we find that the resisting residents’ statements work to disrupt the taken‐for‐granted ‘goodness’ of film enterprise, and creative industries more generally.     

'SALSA NO TIENE FRONTERA': ORQUESTA DE LA LUZ AND THE GLOBALIZATION OF POPULAR MUSIC

This article discusses key dynamics in the globalization of popular music, more specifically the interplay between technology, social and commercial structure, and meaningful sound forms. It analyses Orquesta de la Luz, an all-Japanese salsa band, as an example of the transgression of ethnic, geographical, linguistic and national boundaries of Latin American music. The band demonstrated the intertwined nature of the global and the local, in addition to the historical formation of modern Japanese culture. Their worldwide fame derived from their musicianship, their synchronicity with the world music boom, and finally the diffusion of digital technology in popular music production and consumption. This article argues that economic and technological conditions are as much constitutive of the band's unique practices as are aesthetic ones. It then goes on to question the dichotomies, ‘universalism vs. particularism’ and ‘creativity vs. copy’. This discussion builds towards an examination of the relationship between purist aesthetics (hyperrealism) and the Japanese concept/method of learning; it also explores the notion of cultural authenticity that located the activities of the band. Paradoxically, Orquesta de la Luz demonstrated that Japanization does not necessarily imply synthesis with vernacular elements for purist musicians. Theoretically, this ‘becoming Other’ reveals a parallel capacity for self-exoticization and self-orientalization with respect to Japanese identities. Orquesta de la Luz's musical search for the roots of otherness is closely tied with the feeling among many Japanese youth for the loss of Japan's ‘genuine’ cultural identity. Another focus of this study, then, is to shed light on the relevance of exoticism in the band's foreign reception and to assess their Latino image in the Japanese context.     

Unpopular culture: The case of ‘white trash’

ABSTRACT

This article examines ‘white trash’ as a rhetorical identity in a discourse of difference that white Americans deploy in deciding what will count as whiteness in relation to the ‘social bottom’. Surveying historiographic efforts to valorize ‘poor whites’ in contrast to ‘white trash’, and tracking the redemption of ‘redneck’ as a popular identity, the author delineates how a pollution ideology maintains a portion of whites as fitting problematically into the body of whiteness. Rather than finding an authentic voice in the numerous, current uses of ‘white trash’ in a range of popular culture production, the author instead summarizes ‘white trash’ as an other within the popular — an unpopular culture.     

Sea breeze: Globalisation and cook islands popular music

This paper examines the dynamics of Cook Islands popular music, most commonly referred to as ‘island music’. Among Cook Islands communities at home and abroad, island music is performed at informal gatherings, at nightclubs and bars. It is also a central component of large functions such as weddings and island fundraising events. String bands—who perform island music—undertake performance tours through New Zealand, the Cook Islands and French Polynesia. These bands also record audiotapes and CDs of their music, which are extremely popular among Cook Islander communities across the region. Despite island music's centrality in many social contexts it is also the subject of much critical debate. It is viewed by some both as a ‘bastardisation’ of ‘traditional’ expressive forms and as an indicator of ‘global’ corruption; local music is seen as ‘swamped’ by Western popular music. I argue that these debates are symptomatic of anxiety about globalisation and related notions of authenticity, cultural ownership and loss. They are also ultimately concerned with negotiating locality and identity across the Cook Islands diaspora.     

Eating heritage: caste,colonialism, and the contestation of adivasi creativity

ABSTRACT

This paper uses a multiple colonialisms approach to study cultural production in India and argue that coloniality is not a casteless structure of violence. In discursive and planning rhetoric, ‘creativity is in India’s DNA.’ This discourse incites the poor to harness and develop their tangible and intangible cultural heritage in order to feed themselves. Foregrounding anti-caste, Dalit scholarship in conversation with extant formulations of decolonial aesthetics focuses urgent attention on the fact that caste domination and violence structure inter-state political systems of development planning and post/colonial state discourses of heritage that claim to feed the caste-oppressed poor with their own creativity. This article attends to the political histories and critiques of Indigenous Chhara performance artists because their expressive cultures foreground anti-caste struggles against simultaneous state erasure and capture of Indigenous creativity. Against planning’s compensatory solution of eating heritage, anti-caste scholarship and the creative politics of Budhan Theatre refute the apparent castelessness of what counts as creativity and heritage, demonstrating that optimistic global creative economy discourses actually rely upon caste and colonial histories to entrench caste-based definitions of heritage within international and national development regimes. Budhan Theatre’s decolonizing cultural production avoids the mistakes of postcolonial scholarship and its erasure of caste histories. They prompt a multiple colonialisms approach which refuses labels of postcolonial or settler colonial states to privilege instead attention to the actually existing contemporary ways in which caste violence structures inter-state systems of violence, policies, and discourses.     

Making It in a Cover Music Scene: Negotiating Artistic Identities in a “Kmart‐Level Market”

This research examines how musicians understand art and commerce in a music scene dominated by cover bands. Drawing on thirty semi‐structured interviews and one hundred hours of ethnographic observation, I find that most musicians self‐identify as artists yet perceive social status to be rooted in commercial success. This research details what it means to “make it” in an art world that offers little institutional support or remunerative reward for artistry. Musicians employ three approaches to negotiate the disconnect between artistic identities and commercially defined status: segregating their artistic and commercial pursuits, locating artistry in their commercial work, and justifying their commercially viable activities as a means to attaining a comfortable lifestyle. This on‐the‐ground account of commercial influences’ effects on musicians informs post‐Bourdieusian research on fields of cultural production. I suggest that future research on culture producers must distinguish between social status—a position in a social hierarchy—and interpersonal respect. When esthetics are marginalized as a basis for status, musicians’ status becomes bound to employment opportunities and expansible relative to the extent of the scene.     

Bingo Regulation and the Feminist Political Economy of Everyday Gambling: In Search of the Anti-Heroic

Abstract

This paper uses bingo—a lottery-style game particularly popular with older working-class women—to take forward feminist political economy debates about the everyday. It highlights consumption and regulation as key to research on everyday political economy, and aims to contribute to studies of gambling as a marker of the everyday within critical political economy. Rather than seeing gambling primarily in terms of vernacular risk-taking, however, it argues that gambling is also a pathway into exploring other, more self-effacing political economies—of entertainment, fundraising, sharing, and ‘having a laugh’. Focusing on three key areas of regulatory dispute (over how to win bingo; who can participate; and what defines the game), the research suggests that players and workers are (re)enabling the diverse, plural nature of bingo as a political economic formulation—involving winning; entertainment; fundraising; care; flirting; and playful speculation—in the face of technological and legal processes aiming to standardize the game’s meaning as commercial gambling.     

Football ‘fanzines’ and football culture: a case of successful ‘cultural contestation’*

‘Fanzines’– magazines produced by fans for fans on photocopiers or small presses and circulated by other means than through mainstream commercial channels – provide an alternative to the products of mass publishing and the mass entertainment industry, although often in ‘dialogue’ with these. In England fanzines – like Sniffin’ Glue or When Saturday Comes– have proliferated over the last fifteen years or so, dealing especially with rock and pop music and also, most recently, with football. Fanzines can be seen as enabling a ‘users’ view’ and -sometimes – a radical reinterpretation (or defence) of popular cultural forms to be expressed by people who would otherwise be excluded from any usual means of written expression about, or control over, mainstream institutions in the production of mass culture. This article focuses on the phenomenon of football fanzines (and the Football Supporters’ Association (FSA) – a movement closely associated with fanzines), suggesting (i) that football fanzines and the FSA can be viewed as a particularly potent example of the existence of continued ‘contestation’ over cultural institutions of the kind suggested in relation to sport by Gruneau (1982 and 1983), Donnelly (1988) and others, including ourselves (Jary and Horne 1987 and Horne, Jary and Tomlinson 1987), (ii) that a consideration of football fanzines and the FSA illustrates the value of moving to a wider substantive and theoretical focus in the sociological analysis of football culture than that which has been uppermost in recent years.     

The sampling continuum: musical aesthetics and ethics in the age of digital production

This article argues for a view of popular music production that better accounts for sampling than has historically been the case by viewing it as a continuum of activity. Weighing evidence from interviews with musical practitioners against the legal and industry frameworks, we illustrate, first, how sampling has been legally differentiated from other types of musical copying. Secondly we show that, despite this, comparable ethical codes exist within and across musical methods wherein sampling is part of the spectrum of activities. Thirdly, we discuss the ubiquity of digital technology within popular music production and the resultant closer relationship between sampling and other musical techniques moving onto, fourthly, how the sampling aesthetic has become integrated into musical practice in a manner insufficiently accounted for by its legal and industrial contexts. This ‘post-sampling’ reality places sampling and other musical techniques along a spectrum, in practical and ethical terms, and musicians would be better served by sampling being treated as part of the overall musical palette, allowing both scholars and the law to concentrate on ideologies of practice across the tools that musicians use rather than between different specific techniques.     

Moving mountains armed only with a teaspoon: the work of a ‘centre of excellence’ for residential child care

The Centre for Residential Child Care was established in 1994 as a direct result of the Scottish Office report ‘Another Kind of Home—A Review of Residential Child Care’. In 1997, the Kent report ‘Children's Safeguards Review’ praised its work. The role of so-called ‘centres of excellence’ has at times been queried. This paper seeks to clarify what have been the issues that have faced the Centre, how it has resolved them and what it has found to be key areas of work which have helped the development of good practice. The creation and experience of this Centre is described, its genesis, structure and work outlined, and comments made about what can be deduced from this experience about the role of so-called ‘centres of excellence’ in improving the quality of direct practice.     

Margaret Atwood’s Straddling Environmentalism

Abstract

“Margaret Atwood’s Straddling Environmentalism” asks why Atwood crosses the Canada-US border in her dystopian fiction. It takes Atwood’s 2004 comments that The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) partly grew out of her ‘irritation when people say “it can’t happen here”’ and her claim that she decided to set the novel in Cambridge, Massachusetts as being related to that irritation—’”It can’t happen here,” she explained, “should be placed in the most extreme ‘here”’—as a prompt. Focusing on Oryx and Crake (2003), this article argues that one of Atwood’s motivations for crossing the Canada-US border in this novel is to provoke us to develop what Giovanna Di Chiro has termed ‘a scale-crossing environmental consciousness.’ Oryx and Crake challenges us to think about environmentalism in relation to local, embodied experiences as well as on a global, transnational scale.     

Management in/as Comic Relief: Queer Theory and Gender Performativity in The Office

Our discussion here focuses on gender performativity — the evocation of gender through stylized modes of interaction and the recitation of particular cultural norms — in the BBC comedy series The Office. We suggest that The Office can be read as a cultural text that brings sedimented ways of thinking about and enacting gender into relief, a technique that effectively ‘queers’ management and organization as gendered phenomena. In doing so, we argue that not only does The Office parody the ways in which management is configured according to the terms of what Judith Butler has described as the ‘heterosexual matrix’, but that it also represents a parodic critique of the gendered ways in which this configuration is enacted in everyday organizational encounters. We also suggest that, in addition to its capacity to be read as a parody of gender performativity, The Office reflects queer theory's concern, particularly as the latter has been articulated in Butler's writing, to reveal something of the pathos inherent in the desire for recognition that underpins the hegemonic performance of gender. In this respect, our reading of The Office emphasizes that, as a popular cultural text, it throws into (comic) relief the extent to which the desire for recognition underpins the organizational performance and management of gender in accordance with the terms of the heterosexual matrix.     

Place Brands,Nonbrands, Tags and Queries: The Networks of Urban Activism in the Creative City Istanbul

This article aims for a deeper understanding of an emerging urban-political culture that interweaves digital platforms and urban spaces, institutions and the extra-institutional. It explores political possibilities and limitations of urban activism in the context of ‘creative city’ oriented policy-making in Istanbul, Turkey. My approach highlights the production of agency/disempowerment and solidarity/isolation through socio-technical networks that assemble multifarious issues of concern and care. Activist strategies in Istanbul engaged the productive tension between (1) biopolitical apparatuses introduced with ‘creative city’ governance that extract value from the creative production and cultural participation of citizens and (2) the disregard or devaluation of citizen bodies in socially exclusive processes of urban transformation. The struggle over the impoverished Romani neighbourhood Sulukule, which faced demolition, introduced a mode of urban activism consisting in the appropriation of organizational techniques and regimes of value and visibility of Istanbul's ‘creative city’ governance apparatuses. Repurposing place branding for a technique of networked self-organization and claiming brand value for the deprived neighbourhood, activist practices transfigured the place brand into the anti-brand and nonbrand as well as into tags, queries and addresses operating in digital space. This article analyses Sulukule's struggle – and its connections and disconnections to other struggles – to explore activism's potential to challenge stratifications and inequalities between people and places engendered by ‘creative city’ projects, which themselves are often implicated in exclusive urban transformation processes.     

The sound of liminality: MHD's afro trap,affective listening,and the (re)invention of Afropean identities in France

This article is an exploration of the world making capacities of afro trap. Through an extended case study of MHD's discography, I ask what can be learnt about the liminal experiences of postcolonial black citizens, or Afropean citizens, in France, by listening to popular music. I argue that through embracing, reinventing, and (re)producing familiar Afropean soundscapes, MHD claims and creates from his liminal subject position. Going against the assumption that Frenchness and blackness are always mutually exclusive and in tension, this music sonically proposes a way of being otherwise in France, stemming from this liminality. I see in what I call ‘the sound of liminality’ an instance of ‘queering ethnicity,’ one which channels the affective capacities of sound. I propose affective listening as a method that, incorporating autoethnography to consider critical listening positionality, facilitates a renewed attention to sound as an object of sociological inquiry.     

‘Without Being Walt Whitman’: Vicente Huidobro,Whitman, and the Poetics of Sight

The Chilean vanguardista poet Vicente Huidobro singlehandedly inaugurated the Spanish-language avant-gardes with his 1918 poem Ecuatorial [Equatorial], and remained a dynamic and controversial global figure until his death in 1948. This essay demonstrates how Huidobro appropriated Walt Whitman’s ‘Salut au Monde’ into this inaugural poem, taking from the US poet an elevated, comprehensive poetics of sight. But Whitman’s all-seeing aesthetic seriously threatened Huidobro’s own ethics and avant-garde poetic philosophy — Creationism — leading the Chilean to reject Whitman and this poetic vision in his 1931 Altazor. If Whitman’s poetic speaker could ‘contain multitudes’, seeing the whole world in instant juxtaposition, Huidobro’s ideal Creationist poet must instead empty himself, to create anew. Finally, this textual and historical confrontation reveals not only how Whitman brought his unifying vision to bear on his nation’s Civil War, but also how the aging Huidobro, facing World War II and the imperialist shadow of the US, wrote back to Whitman to qualify and clarify what this vision might mean for ‘America’.     

Authorship,gender and the construction of meaning in the Eurythmics' hit recordings

Abstract

Pop songs are often interpreted, by fans, critics and even academic analysts, in relation to traditional notions of ‘authorship’. But in recent pop, such as the Eurythmics' hits, these notions are at the very least in tension with a more fragmented construction of subjectivity. This article seeks to develop a method for analysing such constructions, both generally and in specific Eurythmics songs.

The method draws on Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic theory of subjectivity and meaning, presenting the various parts of songs (i.e., both textural lines and structural sections) as interactive ‘voices’, each with its characteristic style-features. Such features are always culturally marked, through their multiple associations and their different positionings within various discursive domains. It is possible, therefore, to locate the styles, their features and their interrelations on a range of discursive axes (gender, ethnicity, etc.), making up a ‘map’ of the musico-discursive terrain, then to place the ‘dialogue’ constructed in a specific song in relation to these axes, this map.

For the Eurythmics, the gender axis is the most (though not the only) important one. It functions through the differential positioning of constituent styles (pop, blues, soul, disco, ballad, etc.) on this axis; in relation to other axes of meaning; through articulation in the specific socio-historical context of 1980s British pop; and via interaction with visual images (e.g., on accompanying videos).

After an analysis of eight songs, the article concludes with some implications of the method for the interpretation of gender — and more generally of the construction of subjectivity — in music.