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may f l y Critique of Creativity Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative Industries’ Gerald Raunig, Gene Ray & Ulf Wuggenig (eds)  may f l y www.mayflybooks.org Critique of Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative Industries’ Gerald Raunig, Gene Ray & Ulf Wuggenig (eds) Creativity is astir: reborn, re-conjured, re-branded, resurgent. The old myths of creation and creators – the hallowed labors and privi- leged agencies of demiurges and prime movers, of Biblical world- makers and self-fashioning artist-geniuses – are back underway, producing effects, circulating appeals. Much as the Catholic Church dresses the old creationism in the new gowns of ‘intelligent design’, the Creative Industries sound the clarion call to the Cultural Entre- preneurs. In the hype of the ‘creative class’ and the high flights of the digital bohemians, the renaissance of ‘the creatives’ is visibly enacted. The essays collected in this book analyze this complex re- surgence of creation myths and formulate a contemporary critique of creativity.   Today, at one and the same time, scholarly publishing is drawn in two directions. On the one hand, this is a time of the most exciting theoretical, political and artistic projects that respond to and seek to move beyond global administered society. On the other hand, the publishing industries are vying for total control of the ever-lucrative arena of scholarly publication, creating a situation in which the means of distribution of books grounded in research and in radical interrogation of the present are increasingly restricted. In this context, MayFlyBooks has been established as an independent publishing house, publishing political, theoretical and aesthetic works on the question of organization. MayFlyBooks publications are published under Creative Commons license free online and in paperback. MayFlyBooks is a not- for-profit operation that publishes books that matter, not because they reinforce or reassure any existing market. 1. Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory 2. Dag Aasland, Ethics and Economy: After Levinas 3. Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (eds), Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique 4. Steffen Böhm and Siddhartha Dabhi (eds), Upsetting the Offset: The Political Economy of Carbon Markets 5. Peter Armstrong and Geoff Lightfoot (eds), ‘The Leading Journal in the Field’: Destabilizing Authority in the Social Sciences of Management 6. Carl Cederström and Casper Hoedemaekers (eds), Lacan and Organization 7. Félix Guattari and Antonio Negri, New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty 8. Gerald Raunig, Gene Ray and Ulf Wuggenig (eds), Critique of Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative Industries’  CRITIQUE OF CREATIVITY   Critique of Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative Industries’ Gerald Raunig, Gene Ray and Ulf Wuggenig (eds)  First published in English by MayFlyBooks in paperback in London and free online at www.mayflybooks.org in 2011. Printed by the MPG Books Group in the UK CC: The editors & authors 2011 ISBN (Print) 978-1-906948-13-9 ISBN (PDF) 978-1-906948-14-6 This work has been published in conjunction with the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (www.eipcp.net) and with support of Wien Kultur. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.  Contents Contents vii Contributors ix Acknowledgements xv Introduction: On the Strange Case of ‘Creativity’ and its Troubled Resurrection 1 Gerald Raunig, Gene Ray and Ulf Wuggenig PART ONE: CREATIVITY 7 1 Immanent Effects: Notes on Cre-activity 9 Stefan Nowotny, translated by Aileen Derieg 2 The Geopolitics of Pimping 23 Suely Rolnik, translated by Brian Holmes 3 The Misfortunes of the ‘Artistic Critique’ and of Cultural Employment 41 Maurizio Lazzarato, translated by Mary O’Neill 4 ‘Creativity and Innovation’ in the Nineteenth Century: Harrison C. White and the Impressionist Revolution Reconsidered 57 Ulf Wuggenig, translated by Larissa Buchholz, Aileen Derieg and Karl Hoffmann  PART TWO: PRECARIZATION 77 5 Virtuosos of Freedom: On the Implosion of Political Virtuosity and Productive Labour 79 Isabell Lorey, translated by Mary O’Neill 6 Experiences Without Me, or, the Uncanny Grin of Precarity 91 Brigitta Kuster and Vassilis Tsianos, translated by Aileen Derieg 7 Wit and Innovation 101 Paolo Virno, translated by Arianne Bové PART THREE: CREATIVITY INDUSTRIES 107 8 GovernCreativity, or, Creative Industries Austrian Style 109 Monika Mokre, translated by Aileen Derieg 9 The Los Angelesation of London: Three Short Waves of Young People’s Micro-Economies of Culture and Creativity in the UK 119 Angela McRobbie 10 Unpredictable Outcomes / Unpredictable Outcasts: On Recent Debates over Creativity and the Creative Industries 133 Marion von Osten 11 Chanting the Creative Mantra: The Accelerating Economization of EU Cultural Policy 147 Raimund Minichbauer, language edited by Aileen Derieg PART FOUR: CULTURE INDUSTRY 165 12 Culture Industry and the Administration of Terror 167 Gene Ray 13 Add Value to Contents: The Valorization of Culture Today 183 Esther Leslie 14 Creative Industries as Mass Deception 191 Gerald Raunig, language edited by Aileen Derieg Bibliography 205  ix Contributors Brigitta Kuster is a cultural producer primarily active as video-maker and author. She has dealt with the themes of migration and transnational space, the representation of labor, gender and sexual identity. She has also collaborated with Pauline Boudry, Renate Lorenz and others in a long-term interdisciplinary research project on labor and sexuality. She received the Swiss Art Award in 2006 and 2010. Maurizio Lazzarato is a sociologist, philosopher and independent researcher specialized in studies of relationships of work, economy and society. He works at the University of Paris I. His recent publications include Le gouvernement des inégalités: critique de l’insécurité néolibérale (2008); with Antonella Corsani, Intermittents et précaires (2008); Etude statistique, économique et sociologique du régime d’assurance chômage des professionnels du spectacle vivant, du cinéma et de l’audiovisuel (2005); Les révolutions du capitalisme, Les empêcheurs de penser en rond (2004), and Les mutations du travail sur le territoire de la Plaine St. Denis (2003). Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics in the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Walter Benjamin (Reaktion, 2007), Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (2005), Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (2002) and Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (2000). She is on the editorial boards of the journals Historical Materialism, Radical Philosophy and Revolutionary History. Isabell Lorey is a political scientist, Visiting Professor at the Humboldt University, Berlin (2010 and 2011), Visiting Professor for Gender  Contributors x Studies, Biopolitics and Postcolonial Studies at the Faculty for Social Science, Vienna University (2009), and previously Assistant Professor for Gender & Postcolonial Studies at the University of the Arts Berlin (2001-2007). She has published on: feminist and political theory, biopolitical governmentality, critical whiteness studies, political immunization, and precarization. Figuren des Immunen: Elemente einer politischen Theorie, her habilitation on Roman struggles of order, the Plebeian, concepts of community and immunization, was published with diaphanes in 2011. Angela McRobbie is Professor of Communications at Goldsmiths College, London. Her special topics of research are: gender and feminist theory and cultural studies, and ‘precarious labour’ in art worlds and in the new culture industries. She is the author of In the Culture Society: Art, Fashion and Popular Music (1999), The Uses of Cultural Studies: A Textbook (2005), The Aftermath of Feminism (2008) and Sexuality, Gender and Generation: Postfeminist Art and Culture (2010). Her current research on the ‘new culture industry’ will be published as Be Creative: Precarious Labour in Art and Cultural Worlds, London, Berlin, Glasgow. Raimund Minichbauer has conducted a wide range of studies and research projects in the cultural sector since 1995. He works with the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (eipcp), where he was member of the coordinating teams of the transnational projects republicart (2002-2005), translate (2005-2008) and transform (2005- 2008). He is currently working on the multi-year research project Creating Worlds (2009-2012). He is co-editor, with Maria Lind, of European Cultural Policies (2005). Monika Mokre is a Researcher of the Institute for European Integration Research (EIF), Austrian Academy of Sciences. She is a board member of FOKUS, the Austrian Association for Cultural Economics and Policy Studies, a member of eipcp, and a Lecturer at the Universities of Innsbruck, Salzburg and Vienna. Her research focuses on European democracy and the public sphere, cultural politics and financing of the arts, media politics, and gender studies. Her most recent publications in English are Exchange and Deception: A Feminist Perspective (2010, co-edited with Caroline Gerschlager) and Culture and External Relations: Europe and Beyond (2011, with Jozef Batora).  Critique of Creativity xi Stefan Nowotny is a philosopher based in Vienna. He has collaborated in the eipcp’s transnational projects transform and translate (2005-2008) and Europe as a Translational Space: The Politics of Heterolinguality (2010-2012). He has done research or taught at universities in Belgium, Germany and Austria (since 2001), alongside other project involvements and collaborations. He has published various essays especially on philosophical and political topics, co-edited several anthologies, translated a number of texts from both French and English into German, and co-authored the volumes Instituierende Praxen: Bruchlinien der Institutionskritik (with Gerald Raunig, 2008) and Übersetzung: Das Versprechen eines Begriffs (with Boris Buden, 2008) and co- edited Kunst der Kritik (2010, with Birgit Mennel and Gerald Raunig). Marion von Osten is Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, and works as an artist, author and curator. Her projects focus on the changed conditions of the production of cultural work in neo-liberal societies, technologies of the self and the governance of mobility. Her most recent publication in English is Colonial Modem: Aesthetics of the Past Rebellions for the Future (2010, with Tom Avermaete and Serhat Karakayali). She has edited or co-edited Projekt Migration (2005), Norm der Abweichung (2003), MoneyNations (2003), and Das Phantom sucht seinen Mörder: Ein Reader zur Kulturalisierung der Ökonomie (1999). Gerald Raunig is philosopher and art theoretician. He teaches at the Züricher Hochschule der Künste (Departement Kunst und Medien) where he coordinates the specialization Theory. He is co-founder of the eipcp (European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies) and co- ordinator of the transnational eipcp research projects republicart (2002- 2005), transform (2005-2008) and Creating Worlds (2009-2012). His recent books include Art and Revolution. Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century (2007), and A Thousand Machines (2010) both published by Semiotext(e)/MIT Press. Gene Ray teaches critical studies in the CCC research-based Master Program at Geneva University of Art and Design. He is the author of Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory (2005, 2010) and co-editor, with Gerald Raunig, of Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique (2009).  Contributors xii Suely Rolnik is a cultural critic, curator, psychoanalyst and full professor at the Universidade Católica de São Paulo, where she conducts a transdisciplinary doctoral program on contemporary subjectivity. She is co-author with Félix Guattari of Micropolítica: Cartografias do desejo (1986) and of Molecular Revolution in Brazil (2008). She is author of a research project about Lygia Clark, in which she realized 63 films of interviews, exhibited at the Musée de Beaux-arts de Nantes (Nantes, 2005) and the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (São Paulo, 2006). She lives in Brazil where she has a private practice in psychoanalysis. Vassilis Tsianos teaches theoretical sociology and migration studies at the University of Hamburg. He is a research fellow with the project ‘Transit Migration’ (Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University, Frankfurt) investigating the border regimes in southeast Europe. His research interests and publications include contemporary political theory, labor studies and the concept of the autonomy of migration. He is co-author of Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the Twenty-First Century (2008) and co-editor of a book on ‘Empire and the biopolitical turn’. He is active member of kanak attak and of the Society for Legalization. Paolo Virno is a philosopher living in Rome and teaching at the Università degli Studi Roma Tre. He was active as a member of the Italian political group Potere Operaio during the 1970s, where he was imprisoned for three years before being acquitted. Virno is author of Convenzione e materialismo (1986), Mondanità (1994), Parole con parole (1995), Il ricordo del presente: Saggio sul tempo storico (1999), Grammatica della moltitudine (2001), Esercizi di esodo (2002), Quando il verbo si fa carne: Linguaggio e natura umana (2003), Motto di spirito e azione innovativa (2005), E così via, all’infinito. Logica e antropologia (2010). Books in English are A Grammar of the Multitude (2004), Multitude Between Innovation and Negation (2008) and Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (1996, co-edited with Michael Hardt). He is a contributor to the philosophical review Forme di vita. Ulf Wuggenig is a sociologist at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany, where he is also director of the contemporary visual art gallery of this university (‘Kunstraum’). Among his more recent publications in English are the co-edited catalogue books Dierk Schmidt. The Division of the Earth – Tableaux on the Legal Synopses of the Berlin Africa  Critique of Creativity xiii Conference (2010), Moirés. Andreas Fogarasi, Katya Sander, Urtica (2008, with Astrid Wege) and Next Flag. The African Sniper Reader (2005, with Heike Munder and Fernando Alvim). He co-edited (with Gerald Raunig) Kritik der Kreativität (2007) as well as Publicum (2005) and (with Beatrice von Bismarck and Therese Kaufmann) Nach Bourdieu: Kunst, Visualität, Politik (2008).