Abstract
Introduction
This article draws on empirical research with young people who are involved in the creative industries in Australia. While this work is located in the Australian context, the broader principles arising from our analysis suggest that the way the creative industries have developed globally can be seen as curbing the production of what we call creativity. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s writing on fabulation and creativity, alongside the work of Harris (2014) and others, we develop a definition of creativity and creative ecologies that might expand some of the professional activities that take place within the creative industries. We bring new theoretical resources to the argument developed by Harris (2014) in the chapter titled “Creative Industries or Creative Imaginaries,” in which Harris explicates the problems caused by commodifying creativity and demonstrates the limits that a commodified version of creativity can have on our social imagination.
Defining Creativity and the Creative Industries
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) uses the “Australian and New Zealand Standard Industrial Classification” 2006 (ANZSIC) framework to group all businesses carrying out productive activity. The ANZSIC framework consists of 19 industry categories and the creative industries fit within the ABS classification of “Arts and Recreation Services.” Arts and Recreation Services jobs are grouped together into 12 industry domains and organized under the umbrella of “Cultural and Creative Activity Satellite Accounts.” Australia’s cultural and creative industries include a broad sweep: broadcasting, electronic, or digital media and film; design; environmental heritage; fashion; library and archives; literature and print media; museum; music composition and publishing; other cultural goods and manufacturing and sales; performing arts; supporting activities; visual arts and crafts (https://newapproach.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/5-ANA-InsightReportFive-FullReport.pdf). Importantly, in the ABS on the Cultural and Creative Activity Satellite Accounts, “[p]eople in employment in creative industries include specialist creatives and people employed in support roles.” Moreover, as Marion McCutcheon and Stuart Cunningham (2022) find, [e]mployment trends in the creative services and cultural production industries are highly polarised, with more jobs, higher growth and higher incomes to be found in the more commercially-oriented creative services industries than in cultural production. (p. 4)
The ABS’s usage of the ANZSIC framework to determine where creative industries sit within the economy incorporates 12 industries and statistics that merge those employed in support roles as well as specialist creatives. ABS data do not distinguish between cultural production and outwardly commercialized creative services, which represent the part of the sector that receives most funding, and have the highest employment figures. The majority of growth in what is presented within the ABS data sets on creativity and the creative industries comes from commercialized creative services such as advertising which have a noncritical relationship with capitalism. Cash is king, and as long as a product can be sold, advertising agencies are ready to make money from it.
In articulating the cultural and creative industries, the ABS is informed by a number of resources and stakeholders that place importance on money above other forms of cultural value. It is especially influenced by the “National Culture-Leisure Industry Statistical Framework,” developed by the ABS and Statistics Working Group (SWG). Other independent stakeholders who inform larger government bodies like the ABS utilize the “Creative Intensity Model,” which comprises a set of five criteria that the occupation must fit into to be considered a creative job. These criteria are the following: (a) Does the occupation use novel processes? (b) Is the work of the occupation mechanization resistant? (c) Are processes or outcomes of this occupation nonrepetitive/nonuniform? (d) Does this occupation make a creative contribution to the value chain? And, (e) does this occupation produce new interpretations, or merely transform existing ideas to fit new contexts? (Trembath & Fielding, 2020, p. 26) It is important to consider that, in the Australian Census data gathered through the ABS, the main source of an individual’s income is requested, without the inclusion of supplementary income. This is significant because much creative employment is not a practitioner’s main income source, especially newer and/or younger creatives. For example, [t]he 2017-18 Cultural Participation Survey indicates that the number of musicians who receive income from singing or playing is 11 times the number reported in the 2016 Census. For visual artists, it is nine times as many and it is four times for actors and dancers. (McCutcheon & Cunningham, 2022, p. 2)
In applying the ABS definition of cultural and creative industries, it is important to consider that they do not produce a cultural and creative industries satellite account every year as is the case for, say, tourism, which also contributes highly to gross domestic product (GDP; McCutcheon & Cunningham, 2022). Given the speed at which digital capitalism operates today, this means data may not always reflect the deeper reality of creative work “on the ground.”
It has been recognized in industry reports, policy, critical theory, and scholarship more generally that the whole economy could be considered creative (Escaith, 2022). In sociology, for instance, a number of concepts have been deployed to define broad trends in contemporary work, employment, and economy that speak to the idea of a creative economy, such as the knowledge economy, the attention economy, the cultural economy, the immaterial economy, the experience economy, the information economy, and so on (Du Gay & Pryck, 2002; Franck, 2019; Frenkel, 1999; Lazzarato, 1996; Pine & Gilmore, 1998; Powell & Snellman, 2004). From a Deleuzian standpoint, creativity cuts across these various economies and forms of work. As Richard Florida (2012) espouses, Many say that we now live in an information economy or a knowledge economy. But what’s more fundamentally true is that for the first time, our economy is powered by creativity . . . the shared commitment to the creative spirit in all its many manifestations is what underpins the new creative ethos that powers our age. (p. 6)
While, as Florida (2012) suggests, creativity is a widely deployed buzzword in the private sector as well as in research and public institutions, its slippery affective make-up means it is oftentimes used in policy and scholarship in narrow, overly literal, reductionist, and stereotypical terms (Cameron, 2021; McCutcheon & Cunningham, 2022). Harris (2014) has also made this argument astutely, suggesting that creative economies are so closely entwined with capitalist agendas that they lose meaning: Building on the 1990s knowledge economy, and Florida’s (2007) articulation of the creative class that characterises our post-industrial culture, this new creative economy portends a shift from production to information, and calls for new “modes of education” (p. xvii) to accompany new modes of knowledge. Yet this new creative economy—reflected in schools— is never far from considerations of material conditions and capital. The Creative Capital Report (2008) in Peters and Araya (2010) defines “creativity in relation to artistic, scientific and economic creativity” (p. xvii); like Robinson (2010) and Joubert (2001), these are conceptualisations of creativity as “original ideas that have value.” This chapter problematises the question of who is defining that value. (p. 19)
By staying bound within the formulated creative trident researchers, policymakers and employers are able to “. . . make more conclusive arguments about Australia’s cultural and creative economy” (Trembath & Fielding, 2020, p. 23). Creativity may better describe the optics with which “work,” in its broadest sense, can and could be undertaken as an active force of becoming, born out of resistance, more than simply being used to delineate the arts and acts that cannot be mechanized from the rest of the industrial lifeworld.
Outside the ABS, in Universities as well as independent bodies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), think tanks and policy informers more generally, the creative trident (McCutcheon & Cunningham, 2022) tends to be widely used for delineating creative from noncreative jobs. The creative trident incorporates specialist creatives (who “work in creative occupations within the creative industries”), embedded creatives (who “work in creative occupations in industries other than creative industries”), and support professionals (who “work in support roles—not defined as creative occupations—within the creative industries”; McCutcheon & Cunningham, 2022, p. 2). In fact, in their briefing paper, led by University of Canberra in partnership with the Australia Council, the City of Sydney, the South Australian Government’s Department for Industry, Innovation and Science and the Western Australian Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries, McCutcheon and Cunningham (2022) argue that “Support workers in other occupations in the creative industries earned the highest incomes of all, at $90,500” (p. 1). In other words, higher than average incomes appear in creative industries support roles as opposed to the artists themselves who “have lower incomes and work fewer hours (e.g. music & performing arts)” (McCutcheon & Cunningham, 2022, p. 1). Moreover, the creative industries employ, on average, “1.5 times as many people in support roles as in core creative roles” (McCutcheon & Cunningham, 2022, p. 3). Following the dynamic model approach grounded in the creative trident, their briefing paper,
business-to-business creative services and
business-to-consumer cultural production.
Business-to-business creative services include advertising and marketing, architecture and design, and software and digital content development. Business-to-consumer cultural production includes film, TV, and radio; music and performing arts; publishing; and visual arts.
Independent think tank: activities, objects, goods, services, industries, occupations and qualifications that require
The inclusion of
As noted above, the empirical research we draw on in this article comes from our Australian Research Council Funded Industry Linkage Project Because working in the Performing Arts, of course, all we talk about all the time is creativity and creative approaches and creative problem solving. But it’s been my experience over the years that when government or industry wants to talk about creativity they don’t look to the Arts for creativity, they look for industries like architecture and IT and Engineering, [that] is where they refer to creativity. So I think it’s become like the notion of innovation, it’s become a buzzword that has very little meaning. I think one of the things that’s clear is that we need to create young people who can problem solve, who can work collaboratively and who can adapt to change, and I think young people who have those skills as a general rule, tend to be creative. People that can’t work as collaboratively or can’t problem-solve, often are not as skilled in my experience in creativity. (Steve)
Others spoke of creativity as problem-solving in terms of the reimagining of alternatives and different possibilities, developing new perspectives, and finding new patterns. Speaking to embodied creativity as force and becoming, or affect, others defined creativity in terms of it informing the individual’s sensibility and the life of the mind. For example, Alexandra, who works in the field of music production, draws on her past experience working in youth mental health where the imagination is a crucial motor in becoming: “The imagination is part of creativity and having the capacity to imagine different possibilities” (Alexandra). Similarly, Nik, an artist whose primary medium is painting, explained creativity’s premise within the individual and their personhood: I think it must start with the person rather than having a product type skill set. I think it comes from the person that they will develop in their actions. So, it’s illuminating, what their actions are saying in that creative aspect. (Nik)
Furthermore, critiquing the vocationalization of creativity within the arts in favor of seeing it more esoterically—as embodied and affective—Marcus, who works presently in advertising and marketing, expressed the arbitrary, oftentimes paralyzing, categorical imperative around creativity that begins initially in the abstract machine of schooling: . . . really early on, you are either a creative and you’ve gone to some version of art school, or you are not. Then you tend to be channelled into something, like, strategy, or account director, something like that. In the traditional agency model anyway, and I think what it points to is, this longer-term vocationalisation of the arts and that starts, you know, way back in early school, where your art is either valued by your teachers and so forth and therefore, you should think about a career in the Arts, or it’s not and you need to focus on another part of your brain. (Marcus)
Similarly, Maree, who mentors disadvantaged young people, spoke to the potential of creativity as a force driving the individual’s capacity to act in the world as “giving us the tools to become unstuck.” Others such as Arlie and Riko see creativity as an opportunity to rewire and reconfigure the existing nature of things, rather than escaping the lived reality altogether expressed in such uses of creativity to “reorganise existing elements to create new patterns, structures, designs etc.” (Arlie), and “[t]hink outside of the box and look for solutions that are not obvious” (Riko).
Deleuze & Guattari (1986) does not separate art from other disciplines that are not traditionally considered arts, or creativity from disciplines that are not strictly categorized as art. But, he does separate ideas from the disciplines out of which different creative ideas arise. This, he argues, is because ideas are consecrated in terms of the discipline in which they arise. For example, an idea in cinema will only work in the cinematographic process, or a philosopher’s idea will only work in a piece of philosophy. In other words, as ideas are conjured, they are also shaped by normative disciplinary framing in the very process of their conception, rather than forming in abstract isolation. For Deleuze, creative disciplines are a series of inventions: painting, science, philosophy, cinema are inventions of blocks of perception, inventions of functions, inventions of concepts, or movements in time. Moreover, creativity does not discover, but rather it invents; it creates (Deleuze, 2007). The creator, furthermore, is not working for pleasure; creators do nothing but what they feel they
In Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) language, creative ecologies or what they call “creativity” expresses an active force of
For Deleuze (2003), creativity in Bacon’s work lies in his ability to create new forms that express intense sensations rather than merely reproducing familiar images. Bacon’s paintings evoke emotions and affect the viewer on a visceral level, offering an experience that defies conventional symbolic representation. Within this context, he develops the concept of cliché, art is that which escapes the cliché. Capitalism sells the cliché. For Deleuze, clichés are ready-made images that have become overly familiar and conventionalized in the collective imagination. These clichés can include iconic images from art history, popular culture, or even personal memories and experiences. Bacon does not simply seek to escape cliché but, instead, confronts and transforms it through his paintings. He uses clichéd images as a starting point, but in the process of creation, he distorts, mutilates, and reconfigures them. By doing so, he liberates the cliché from its fixed, representational meaning and turns it into a “force of sensation”: a feeling that pushes the observer to think in new ways (Deleuze, 2003).
Deleuze (2003) argues that Bacon’s approach subverts traditional representational practices. Instead of trying to depict an object or a figure in a straightforward manner, Bacon engages in a process of deformation and metamorphosis. His paintings are a confrontation between the visible and the invisible, the figurative and the abstract, the form and the formless. Through his creative process, Bacon breaks down the barriers between figure and ground, dissolving the boundaries between the subject and its environment. He creates an intensive space of sensation where the viewer is confronted with the conflicting forces of existence rather than a clear representation of reality. If we take this notion of dissolving clichés as a key characteristic of Deleuze’s conception of creativity and creative labor, or what Harris would call a creative ecology (2014), then it becomes clear that there are numerous contemporary creative jobs and creative industries that are currently outside of the bureaucratic category of creative industries. We explore these creative industry and labor dynamics in the following sections, beginning with a discussion of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the
Minor Versus Major arts
The measures used to delineate between different creative industries often run counter to a Deleuzian concept of creativity. If, after Deleuze, we define creativity as not having an end-goal, as escaping cliché through reconfiguring common thoughts and practices within the industry, as a form of becoming born out of resistance, and as driven by artists and creatives who are not working out of pleasure as much as an inner sense of necessity or striving, then a hierarchy of valuation becomes clear. Deleuze discusses the concepts of minor and major arts in his collaborative work with Félix Guattari, namely, in
In
For Deleuze and Guattari, the distinction between minor and major arts is not intended to place one above the other, but rather, to explore the differences in their modes of production, reception, and sociopolitical implications. They suggest that minor arts can influence major arts by challenging established norms and pushing the boundaries of what art can be; minor arts can deterritorialize major arts by forming new lines of flight (O’Sullivan, 2005b). We take this argument further, in suggesting that training for the creative industries also influences creative practice in fields that are not traditionally considered “creative,” and vice versa: Some “creative” work actually manufactures clichés. For example, as pointed out earlier, “[T]here are more people in creative roles working in industries other than the creative industries than within them” (McCutcheon & Cunningham, 2022, p. 1). Moreover, in statistical models categorized by industry, discussed in the previous section, as well as the funding models used in policy and by governments to distribute resources to creative industries, which we discuss in the following section, major creative industries tend to be featured predominantly as pillars in justifying the place of the arts in cultural economy leaving little visibility for the minor arts.
Even in the creative work of dancers, located in an established artform and creative industry, there is a devaluation of certain forms of dance over others within the industry itself. For example, major ballet companies can be compared with alternative not-for-profit hip hop spaces in the distribution of funding. At the level of the creative industries, dance can be devalued through being compared with larger, major arts industries like popular music or mainstream publishing (Zhuang, 2023). When we spoke with Dahlia, an employee at one of Melbourne’s not-for-profit dance organizations specializing in hip-hop as a means of strengthening community, she explained this hierarchy of support in the creative industries: I mean, yeah, especially in dance, I feel that there’s not this kind of advocacy that music has. Like, I know you guys have worked with The Push that, you know, they do have a lot of support. There’s government support. It’s yeah, there’s Music Victoria, there’s The Push, there’s FReeZa groups. So (it’s) different, whereas in dance we don’t really have any of that, we’ve got Ausdance. You know there’s not that sharing of knowledge and information and you know, if you want to talk about rates in the music industry you can talk to someone about exactly that. You know how to put on a gig, who to talk to. It’s yeah, there’s nothing . . . (Dahlia)
When viewed through a Deleuzian frame that does not separate creativity from other disciplines, or creativity from disciplines that are not strictly categorized as art, creativity includes things like philosophy, design, illustration, teaching, engineering, repurposing and recycling, gardening and landscaping, video games, technology, street art, skateboarding, fashion subcultures and digital media production, and more. As mentioned earlier, industry spillover is chronic within the creative industries. Minor arts are often threatened by major appropriation, too, minor deterritorializing only to be reterritorialized by the major once accepted into the popular vernacular—usually through sheer volume or becoming viral (Bogue, 2011b). For example, the video game industry has grown exponentially over the years, with a massive global audience and revenue. Street art involves creating art in public spaces, often illegally tagged on private property outside the traditional gallery context. It includes graffiti, murals, and installations in urban environments. Street artists (such as GhostPatrol and MISO / Stanislava Pinchuk) have gained recognition and commercial success, blurring the lines between conventional art and public expression. In addition, while the mainstream fashion industry is a well-established multibillion dollar capitalist machine, there are numerous fashion subcultures (notably, sustainable fashion) and independent nonconforming fashion designers that exist outside the traditional fashion system. These subcultures often challenge mainstream norms and incorporate DIY (Do It Yourself) elements and alternative aesthetics.
The rise of digital platforms and music streaming services have also allowed independent musicians and artists to reach broader audiences without relying solely on major record labels. In this respect, digital technology has fostered a more diverse and decentralized music landscape. But, again, the minor is always under major threat: Music streaming platforms, such as Spotify, take profits away from artists and remake the exchange of music consumption as a practice that financially supports advertising agencies rather than artists. Furthermore, with the advancements in technology, industries related to virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have emerged. This includes VR gaming, AR applications in various sectors (e.g., marketing, education, and health care), and immersive experiences. Here, the line between creativity and education is blurred, as the new experiences that are shaped in VR have a creative aspect, but they are also pedagogical, they have been designed for a purpose, and they are teaching people how to behave in new settings. They are not pushing users to think in new ways, as much as to negotiate new situations they might not otherwise get to experience. As such, the lines between capitalism and creativity are constantly being over coded, and the minor is constantly vulnerable to major appropriation, as the capitalist machine continues to consume its own outsides.
The Market for Creativity: Creative Industries Funding in the Australian Context
As we have argued, in Australia the creative industries tend to be identified according to the “Australian and New Zealand Standard Industrial Classification” 2006 (ANZSIC) framework made up of 19 industry categories. Australia’s cultural and creative industries are broadly defined by ABS as “Arts and Recreation,” and are broken into 12 industry domains organized under the umbrella of “Cultural and Creative Activity Satellite Accounts.” The ABS is informed by a number of resources and stakeholders, including Australian Census data, and especially influenced by the “National Culture-Leisure Industry Statistical Framework,” which is developed in conjunction with the SWG. Other independent stakeholders who inform larger bodies like the ABS utilize the “Creative Intensity Model,” which is a set of five criteria that an occupation must fit into to be considered a creative job. Outside the ABS, in Universities as well as independent bodies, NGOs, think tanks and policy informers more generally, the creative trident tends to be widely used for delineating creative from noncreative jobs (Specialist creatives; Embedded creatives; Support professionals).
We have identified a number of empirical gaps within the statistical model of defining the creative industries through the major arts: Namely, (a) people employed in the cultural and creative activity satellite accounts include specialist creatives and people employed in support roles; thus, caution should be exercised when interpreting the data which are not solely referring to those
We have also noted that Deleuze develops a specific concept of “becoming” as opposed to “being.” He believed that individuals and things are not static entities but are continually in a state of becoming something else. This perspective encourages an openness to transformation and a rejection of rigid categories and identities. With his collaborator, Deleuze and Guattari (2013) also introduced the now popular concept of the rhizome, which is a model for understanding nonlinear and interconnected processes that have no common root unlike arborescent forms. The rhizome represents a network where ideas and influences can disperse, flow, and connect in multiple directions. This idea challenges conventional hierarchical thinking and encourages a more fluid and creative approach to knowledge and problem-solving.
In light of these concepts, one can argue that Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy implies that creativity is not confined to a specific domain or skill set but is a fundamental aspect of existence. Creativity, according to Deleuze, involves embracing the multiplicity of perspectives, exploring the potential for change and transformation, and breaking free from fixed and constraining structures.
From this perspective, creativity can indeed be seen as a transferable skill because it is not limited to artistic or creative endeavors alone. Instead, it becomes a way of approaching the world and engaging with different domains, whether they are philosophical, scientific, artistic, or practical. Deleuze’s philosophy invites individuals to think creatively, to challenge established norms, and to seek new connections and possibilities, thereby suggesting that creativity is a skill that can be applied across various contexts and disciplines.
In developing our argument, it is necessary to consider—in addition to the modes of categorization deployed by governmental organizations and NGOs to define and organize creative work—the logic of funding models that are applied to the creative industries. Because, funding of the creative industries also implies a definition of creativity that runs counter to the Deleuzian formulation being applied in this article. In delineating between creative industries funding in the context of policy and governance, Potts and Cunningham (2008) provide a useful framework for exploring the ways the creative industries tend to be conceptualized at the macro policy, governance, bureaucratic, and funding levels dictating the allocation of resources to creativity in Australia. The authors’ explore the treatment of creative industries funding and its general place in the economy according to three models, in addition to a fourth potential category. These are the Welfare Model, the Competition Model, the Growth Model, and the Innovation Model. They begin with the Welfare Model, whereby “the creative industries are a net drain on the economy, although a net drain worth having, as the overall effect is welfare positive” (Potts & Cunningham, 2008, p. 5). This is because the immaterial value of the cultural commodity is disproportionately higher compared with its low market value; thus, discourse around the creative and cultural industries, framed in classical economic terms, sees these industries as unprofitable but socially necessary; this is the welfare model. In Australia, Model 1 could be considered the most likely ideological perspective of the previous coalition government, prior to the current government’s unveiling of
Model 2, the Competition Model, Potts and Cunningham (2008) explain, “differs from model 1 in allowing that the creative industries are not economic laggards, nor providers of special goods of higher moral significance, but effectively ‘just another industry’: in effect, the entertainment or leisure industry” (p. 6). According to the authors, Model 2 is the default microeconomic position used in policy analysis, which assumes that changes in the funding, “size or value of the creative industries has a proportionate (but structurally neutral) effect on the whole economy” (the same as with the other industries; Potts & Cunningham, 2008, p. 6). Model 3, on the contrary, the Growth Model, sees the creative industries as much more of a driver in the general economy in similar fashion to the driving forces of the agricultural industry in the early 20th century, manufacturing in the Industrial Revolution, and ICT in the 21st century, based on the way these industries “. . . introduce novel ideas into the economy that then percolate to other sectors (e.g., design-led innovation)” (Potts & Cunningham, 2008, p. 8). The Growth Model, then, correlates growth in the creative industries with growth in the economy more generally, assuming that the creative industries would crystallize to form a host of new industries, niches, and markets. Whereas Model 1 sees funding creative industries as leading to net losses, Model 3 sees funding as growth
Applying Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of creativity to the creative industries funding and policy discourse reveals how Models 3 and 4—the Growth and Innovation Models—are the most theoretically aligned depictions of Deleuzian creativity being enacted in policy arts funding modeling, that is, creativity as practice and becoming-active; creativity as escaping cliché; creativity as inventions of blocks of movement in time, inventions of concepts, and inventions of functions; and creativity as driven by necessity. In juxtaposition to the growth and innovation models, when looking at real-world policy and funding of the creative industries “on the ground,” Models 1 and 2 are the most commonly applied paradigms for thinking about what constitutes the creative industries, as well as decisions around which of these industry territories gets funded. For example, in the recent unveiling of the
Following a Deleuzian line of thinking, when creative industries and art more generally are reduced to commercial and symbolic value, much of what constitutes creative work as a force of becoming-active is lost. This results in a considerably narrower set of relevant aggregates to measure creativity around, as well as a narrower cohort of players being funded and deemed worthy and chosen, territorializing the creative industries in the process. If we are to follow Deleuze’s conceptualization, the more
Deleuzian notions of creativity often run counter to the capitalist framework/profit, and within the creative industries this contradiction is illuminated. This is largely because of the ontological principle of
The question of how creative work becomes priced and commodified, then, becomes key to the Competition Model that frames funding decisions and exposes the disjuncture between freelancer creative workers and those in commercial organizations whose work is union-backed and industry-backed. For example, when we spoke with young freelance street and hip hop dancers, there was consensus among the group around how little advocacy, transparency, and support they had access to when selling their creative work. As mentioned above, Dahlia spoke about how, as opposed to arts like music, in dance we don’t really have any of that, we’ve got Ausdance. You know there’s not that sharing of knowledge and information and you know, if you want to talk about rates in the music industry you can talk to someone about exactly that.
Hector, another dancer, explained an instance when he was working with a commercial shoe brand who had recruited him as a freelance dancer among a collective of other people whom he knew. While all of them were freelance dancers contracting themselves out, the group were offered different rates by the company. In a confused tone, he retells the story: . . . because when they reached out to all of us, they reached out with different rates; some were lower than the others and we were trying to understand like, what’s their logic? Like, what are they looking for exactly? And so we had to be like, we all are gonna go for the same amount of pay. And so we were all like, “Hi so we all want to be paid this, because we have to do this and this and this and this,” kind of like explain “oh we have to get the camera guy and pay them and like you know all type of stuff and yeah it really got me thinking like what exactly are they paying for?” . . . So are they paying for my skills that I could be bringing into the content, are they paying for the content itself? (Hector)
The interviewer responds with an understanding nod about the blurring of lines in creative work and how the modes and categories relied upon in measuring the creative industries quickly muddy and reduce values. He sympathizes, It’s a complex one to like, and I think even more complex with social media because like you said, is it local, is it global and you know, like, what’s the audience for this? Yeah, yeah. How do you and how do you price it? Yeah yeah. And the reuse of content and where does stuff go?
The blurring of skills and value involved in creativity and the creative industries further reinforces Deleuze’s point that it is not so much about the end-goal and output as it is the process: Creative “process is an interminable and heterogeneous becoming rather than a homogenous and teleological path” (Karakilic & Painter, 2022, p. 90). The creative industries—and works being promoted and funded—do not seem necessarily creative in the respect that they do not need to push people to think in new ways. They do not connect previously unrelated fields or develop new models. Often, they are manufactured clichés that fit into preexisting stereotypes: profit, competition, growth, representation, political correctness, potential for becoming major through such notions as “fame” and “going viral,” palatability, marketability, clout, social media engagement, organizational credentials, public policies informed by potentially reductionist statistics and state/city/council incentives that drive the decisions to promote, fund, and include some creative industries and arts above others. Like Hector asked above, “what’s their logic?” We stop short at suggesting that strategies to save money and to make money can be considered “logic,” but that is the sum total of what is happening in most of these situations.
Fabulation, Affects, and the Theatrical Reality of Working in the Creative Industries
The concepts of fabulation and affect highlight the ontological basis of creativity and corresponding blind spots in the ways creative industries are designated and measured, provided exposure, valued, and funded. Deleuze and Guattari draw on Bergson’s notion of fabulation in developing the concept further by applying it to the realm of creativity (Bogue, 2006). Bergson’s initial conceptualization of fabulation places it squarely in the realm of religion, as a kind of cognitive and visionary faculty that “creates gods and giants” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 230). Similarly, like the visions of gods and giants created by the semi-personal powers of the self in the religious context, artists also fabulate through their pursuit of the symbolic character of perspective—itself a giant—but through an aesthetic frame, rather than the transcendental frame of religion (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). Regardless of its context, Bergson describes fabulation as “. . . a protective illusion that saves us from the void of social dissolution and individual despair” (Bogue, 2006, p. 206). There is a utopian and political quality to fabulation, which Deleuze and Guattari (1994) unravel in their development of Bergson’s fabulation. This is because of the way—through envisioning symbolic characters—fabulation “activate(s) the ‘powers of the false,’ to falsify orthodox truths in the process of generating emergent truths” (Bogue, 2011a, p. 81). It is born out of people engaging with minor practices and, in doing so, engaging with a process of self-invention. This can oftentimes be initiated by activating creative emotion in the form of minor practices, which in turn invents a people to come. For example, by the (somewhat rare) writer’s efforts to do violence to words and strain them in forging new concepts and sensibilities, in turn they summon forth a people to come—like the emergence of the Beat Generation of writers through the likes of Burroughs’s and Allen Ginsberg’s unorthodox and unruly early works (Bogue, 2006, p. 207; Deleuze & Guattari, 2013). For Deleuze and Guattari (1994), this is where the utopian potential lies in the concept—its capacity to deterritorialize and to create new forms out of the resistance of minor people. Deleuze and Guattari (1994) suggests that “Fabulation is a way to emerge from
One of the key routes for a minor people engaged in a minor process of artmaking, in activating creative emotion—out of which fabulation often emerges—is through the production of affects. Originally termed sensibility, affect, for Deleuze and Guattari (1994), represents nonhuman becoming; sensations awakened in the collisions between bodies and other bodies, objects, and ideas (Massumi, 2014). And while the individual is affected uniquely—in accordance with the history of ideas that make up the life of their own mind, in works of art, “affections go beyond the strength of those who undergo them. Sensations, percepts, and affects are Certainly one thing such statistics are not really set up to understand is the modern reality of precarious employment. This is important for any discussion of craft and inequality, for much craft income generation occurs of necessity in the cracks between the neat statistical classifications: through self-employment, second (or third, or fourth) jobs, cash-in-hand or volunteer work, and work that can move variously between being understood as amateur or professional. It is in this complex balancing act of multiple income streams that much craft labour is to be found. (p. 942)
Fabulation, affect, the minor, and creativity align in Deleuze’s conceptual world as processes of becoming. They emerge at the crossroads of social pressure (major practices) and intelligence (which rationalizes). Creative ecologies and the practices of those engaged with minor disciplines produce affects—sensations of nonhuman becoming as bodies collide with other bodies, objects and ideas. Affects born out of creative emotion form artworks that are in and of themselves affective compounds transcending the lived experience. Fabulation, or legending, emerges out of resistance, as does art and creativity: to create is to resist (Bogue, 2011a). Furthermore, affects, creativity, and fabulation all deny an external goal as motivation in their “irreducibly temporal process of becoming-other” (Bogue, 2011a, p. 82).
Applying a Deleuzian-informed framework of creativity or creative ecologies to the creative industries in exploring the measures used to delineate, fund, value, and categorize them illuminates the disjuncture between creativity in practice. Through the concept of fabulation, which Deleuze and Guattari (1994) develop out of Bergson’s initial application to religious transcendence, it becomes clear that artists engaging in minor practices may be the strongest vector for redefining and revaluing creativity. Similar arguments are advanced by Harris (2014) and Snepvangers et al. (2018). Fabulation may help to create a future way of seeing and viewing creativity that does not restrict and demean artists according to their commercial value as in the dominant funding models. This is the storytelling capacity of fabulation: storytelling for a people to come, rather than storytelling as a representation of an imagined, projected, world (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 110).
Conclusion
There are blind spots in how the creative industries—and art practice more generally—are conceived and governed. Our analysis follows the work of Harris (2014), Luckman (2020, 2022), and others such as McCutcheon and Cunningham, each of whom has illuminated the way creativity is an ontological mode of becoming-active, embedded in our everyday life experiences of affecting and being affected. Creativity is a transferable skill that traverses institutional and vocational boundaries. Minor arts that deterritorialize the creative industry space present interesting opportunities for artists and creatives of all kinds to engage in fabulation, as “summoning a people to come” (Bogue, 2006, p. 207).
The conclusion of our argument is more of an invitation than a demonstration of mastery. It does not serve anyone to open out “creative” practice into the many dispersed areas of practice that we have identified as providing a home for new ways of modeling thought and practice. However, if we can develop a sensibility and funding model that allows us to read the practice of creating forms that need to be thought of in new ways as “creative practice,” then the remit of what is financially supported by the government as being germane to creative practice will change. We need to support experimental practice and provide opportunities for working outside the status quo in ways that current models for the creative industries do not allow.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
Funding
ORCID iD
Author Biographies
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