Journal for Cultural Research

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Introduction: Autonomy and Creative Labour

Fabian Holt & Francesco Lapenta

To cite this article: Fabian Holt & Francesco Lapenta (2010) Introduction:
Autonomy and Creative Labour, Journal for Cultural Research, 14:3, 223-229, DOI:
10.1080/14797581003791453

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JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH VOLUME 14 NUMBER 3 (JULY 2010)

Introduction: Autonomy and

Creative Labour

Fabian Holt and Francesco Lapenta

[email protected]
Journal
10.1080/14797581003791453
RCUV_A_479667.sgm
1479-7585
Original
Taylor
302010
14
FabianHolt
00000July
and
&for
Article
Francis
(print)/1740-1666
Cultural
Francis
2010 Research (online)

Over the past decade, creativity and creative work have become powerful tropes
in contemporary social life. Younger generations are moving to urban areas
where creative work is available and identified with new forms of sociality and
prestige. Lifestyle magazines, sitcoms, and other popular media products convey
positive images of self-realisation through creative work in lifestyle environ-
ments such as stylish Internet cafés, clubs, fashion shows, and media space. In
the popular imagination of the entrepreneurial city, the “creative class” has
cultural and economic capital (Cronin & Hetherington 2008; Florida 2002). After
all, who would not prefer work identified with excitement, flexibility, and pres-
tige rather than with anonymity and routine?
The turn to labour in cultural studies resulted from the recognition of the
growing importance of work in contemporary lifestyles and the de-differentiation
between paid, voluntary, and “free” labour (McRobbie 2002; Terranova 2004).
The engagement with labour is also a response to neo-liberal management ideol-
ogies and creative industry policies. In the process, the boundaries of cultural
studies have been transformed. Issues of creativity and culture have evolved
across the social sciences in departments for creative industries and new fields
such as production studies within media studies (Hesmondhalgh & Baker 2010;
Mayer et al. 2009). As a consequence, it is now less clear what the agenda of
cultural studies is.
Scholars such as Angela McRobbie (2002) and Andrew Ross (2003) have
produced astute critiques of the positive narratives and institutional policies of
creative labour. Along with many others, they have demonstrated that creative
labour can be as exploitative as any other kind of work, and that it is frequently
subjected to more unstable and unregulated terms than other kinds of work. In
fact, the forms of exploitation are more subtle and hidden because of the strong
positive associations with creative work. The creative products and the spheres
of production have unique emotional and aesthetic capacities that affect work-
ers’ judgments and transform conventional logics in labour markets. Workers
can be entranced and ultimately deceived to conduct free labour under false
promises.

ISSN 1479–7585 print/1740–1666 online/10/030223–07

© 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14797581003791453
224 HOLT AND LAPENTA

While a critical engagement with the problematic aspects of creative labour is

an important and ongoing project, it remains an open question how this critique
can be conducted to create a more complete understanding of labour conditions,
and how the conditions can be improved. What is striking after a decade of crit-
icism is the growing interest in more holistic and normative approaches to
creative labour. If studies of creative labour have done much to deconstruct
images and illusions, little is known about how it is possible to establish a critical
ground for understanding how and under what conditions creative labour can be
defined as good or bad work. The normative move in this special issue of the
Journal for Cultural Research also evolves from a critical engagement with prob-
lematic forms of individualism, directing greater attention to the ethical and
collective dimensions of good work. Normativity is not invoked as a rhetorical
strategy in itself but as part of a more complex argument that develops in the
context of creative labour studies in the past decade and the broader historical
and philosophical past.

Rethinking Autonomy

A useful focal point in this respect is the concept of autonomy. The concept
has already received much attention in criticisms of exploitation and self-
exploitation, but its explanatory potential has not been fully developed in a
contemporary context. Autonomy is a sine qua non of creative work and a key
concept for rethinking important problems and values. The intellectual origins
of the concept lie in philosophical traditions of the Enlightenment in which
autonomy served as a discursive ground for a new social imagination on two
levels.
The first was the ideal of the reflexive bourgeois individual. The bourgeois
male subject strived for the capacity and right to make his own rational choices
about politics, taste, and the good life, implying that something can only be
good if it is a good to the individual and recognised as such by the individual
(Pippin 2004). Thus, freedom can be described as a feeling and perception, and
autonomy refers to a condition, and how agency is structured. In German ideal-
ism and other philosophical traditions, autonomy evolved around a rather
abstract concept of the subject and without much theorisation of social forces
and dependencies. This happened in Marxism, in which autonomy of the individ-
ual was defined against the social system of capitalism. Here, work was a key
site for the modes of domination (Cleaver 2000). Autonomist Marxists such as
Negri have argued in favour of a negation of the system, and of work (Gill &
Pratt 2008, pp. 5–7). The present special issue recognises growth in the creative
labour market and instead focuses on the negotiation of autonomy within the
system.
The second level was the autonomy of value spheres or discursive domains.
Expanding and revising a large-scale philosophical system within German ideal-
ism, Kant’s (1791) distinctions between aesthetic, moral, and rational judgment
 INTRODUCTION 225

paralleled new institutional divisions in society. Art, for instance, was also
defined as autonomous in the sense that it was not part of an overarching religious
order; it served no other purpose than being art. This involved a loss of overall
social connection, purpose, and unity that was lamented by Hegel in his lectures
on aesthetics (Hegel 1834–45). Autonomy was thus embedded in a history of social
fragmentation, resulting from the processes of modernity, and not only secular-
isation but also the development of capitalism, the public sphere, and the nation
state (Baumann 2000; Gieben & Hall 1992; Habermas 1962).
It should be noted from the outset that autonomy itself has always had a
political dimension. The discourse of autonomous art served to legitimise
bourgeois taste, and autonomy underpins debates about individualism and insti-
tutional separation in political philosophy. In cultural theory, discrepant
conceptions of autonomy are critical to the conceptualisation of culture and
society. Raymond Williams, for instance, emphasised unity and coherence in his
concern for solidarity and community. A contrast to this can be found in Jean-
François Lyotard’s incommensurability thesis and other postmodern conceptions
of culture (Prendergast 2000, p. 45).
The political dimension of autonomy and cultural theory more generally is
addressed throughout this special issue of the journal. The conceptual and the
political constantly intersect. In this special issue, autonomy is discussed and
reconceptualised against three major issues.
The first issue is the development of the creative industries. The development
involves a rationalisation of artistic practices into creative products such as
media work and design. Artistic work is generally contingent on the rules of art
characterised by an emphasis on artistic autonomy and originality, but also a
greater resistance to the industrial system. Both creative and artistic work,
however, tend to be restrained but never eliminated when absorbed into indus-
trial production. The authors in this special issue follow Ryan’s (1992, p. 5) argu-
ment that cultural production is never reducible to capitalist demands because
it must encompass other forms of value derived from art. A certain level of
autonomy is necessary to produce creative products of cultural and economic
value, but autonomy is not a monolithic concept. Rather, it is constituted in
complex relationships between these contradictory and unstable forces.
The second issue concerns market and employment conditions in the creative
industries. The relation between dependence and independence for the individ-
ual creative worker is increasingly defined in relation to the market and to indus-
trial employment conditions. The advent of a market for artistic and cultural
products has provided creative workers with new forms of autonomy. However,
producing for a market turns artistic and creative work into commodities and
draws workers into a particular labour market. The creative labour market is
characterised by a high degree of temporary and part-time employment; by
free labour either directly or more indirectly, masked in the form of internships.
Moreover, the creative industries are generally marked by a hierarchical division
between a small group of workers with a high degree of creative and complex
work on the one hand and a large group of workers conducting generic and routine
226 HOLT AND LAPENTA

work on the other. Even among the latter group — sometimes called the “creative
precariat” — small elements of creativity are ascribed great importance.
The third major issue concerns individualism and subjectivity in self-realisation.
The contradictory forces in capitalist cultural production can be registered in the
complex subjectivities of creative workers. Workers are more than bearers of
established structures; they have a certain level of autonomous agency and
subjectivity. But good work cannot be defined by a high level of individual auton-
omy alone. Individualism becomes problematic when it evolves into narcissism
and a lack of ethical concerns for collectivity and social justice.

Negotiating Autonomy and Self-Realisation

The four articles of this special issue develop the contemporary theory of auton-
omy and creative labour. Hesmondhalgh’s and Banks’s articles are closely related
by a common focus on the theorisation of autonomy and self-realisation. The
theorisation evolves around conceptions of agency and subjectivity (Banks), good
work, ethical life, and social justice (Hesmondhalgh). Both authors draw on their
recent empirical work (Banks 2007; Hesmondhalgh & Baker 2010).
The articles by Stahl and Arvidsson (with Malossi and Naro) are based on
empirical research and provide a ground for comparisons of autonomy and self-
realisation as negotiated by workers in two creative industry formations: the
fashion industry in Milan and the animation film industry in the USA.
Hesmondhalgh and Banks set the agenda. They guide readers through a critical
discussion of the key concepts and develop an argument for reconceptualising
autonomy as a constitutive and negotiated feature of good work. Hesmondhalgh
departs from cultural studies and gradually moves into sociology. He moves from
individualism to a more collective and ethically informed concept of autonomy.
This argument is complemented by Banks’s discussion of the complex subjectiv-
ities of creative workers who negotiate autonomy within the contradictory forces
in capitalist cultural production.
Whereas Hesmondhalgh and Banks point to the collective and subjective
tensions in various critical discourses on autonomy, Arvidsson (with Malossi and
Naro) and Stahl explore how these tensions are embodied in the daily practices
of creative workers in two creative industry formations. In their studies of the
animation film industry and the fashion industry, respectively, Stahl and Arvidsson
(with Malossi and Naro) describe a rather ambiguous situation for creative work-
ers. On the one hand, the work of the fashion personal assistant and the storyboard
artist is underpaid, generic, repetitive, and often “uncreative” and alienating.
However, these workers express high levels of job satisfaction. Arvidsson (with
Malossi and Naro) explains the apparently contradictory situation as reflective of
an ideology that partially suspends the classic labour theory of value in favour of
an “identity theory of value”. A similar logic appears in Stahl’s account of how
storyboard artists accept a form of alienation in the contractual limitation of self-
government and ownership. This loss of autonomy is exchanged for a sense of
 INTRODUCTION 227

embeddedness in occupational communities, professional prestige, and, some-

times, very high pay.
David Hesmondhalgh’s article, “Normativity and Social Justice in the Analysis
of Creative Labour”, juxtaposes competing definitions of the concepts of auton-
omy and self-realisation as either positive or negative properties of creative
labour in the cultural industries. These concepts, Hesmondhalgh argues, have
been mostly interpreted by post-structuralist studies, and cultural studies
critiques of creative labour, as either forms of self-exploitation or as ideological
tools for harnessing workers’ self-actualisation efforts for productivity, effi-
ciency, and the like. Hesmondhalgh criticises these dismissive critiques of the
concepts and suggests that autonomy and self-realisation can more productively
be understood in relation to the non-individualistic idea of good work. Within this
sociological framework, the concepts maintain relevance and gain new momen-
tum when interpreted as contextual and relative autonomy, and understood in
relation to normative efforts to define self-realisation through conceptions
of good work, ethical life, and social justice. These debates, Hesmondhalgh
concludes, illustrate some of the problems of rejecting normativity in relation to
labour and must be considered as part of an effort to broaden debates about the
meaning of good or meaningful work and its distribution across modern societies.
Two major themes in Hesmondhalgh’s article are subject to further discussion
in Mark Banks’s “Autonomy Guaranteed? Cultural Work and the ‘Art—Commerce
Relation’”. His discussion of autonomy unfolds the dual process of the autonomi-
sation and commercialisation of culture characteristic of modernity. Banks is
informed by the concept of culture in Continental European criticism. Cultural
production, in this context, is traditionally associated with aesthetic values and
products, and discursively derived from bourgeois concepts of art in philosophi-
cal aesthetics. His argument is that culture is intrinsically autonomous, and that
even if its autonomy can be limited, exploited, and misappropriated, it remains
a constituting factor and a sine qua non in any cultural production. Banks adopts
this interpretation to provide ground for theorising contemporary notions of
autonomy for creative labour in the cultural industries. According to Banks, the
critiques inspired by Adorno, Foucault, and Bourdieu fail to fully understand the
unstable and transgressive potential of a labour process underpinned by auton-
omy as its normative principle. In order to deliver valuable products, Banks
argues, the cultural industries have to accept the uncertainties and unintended
consequences that arise from aesthetic and creative values. In doing so, the
practices of business professionals in the cultural and creative industries might
well engender alienation, individualism, prestige, or instrumentality, but these
are also potentially transformable in the context of the open and ambiguous
sense of autonomous subjectivity that derives from creative work.
The two articles that follow contextualise Hesmondhalgh’s and Banks’s theory
in the professional domains of the animation film industry in California and the
fashion industry in Milan, Italy. Matt Stahl’s “Cultural Labor’s ‘Democratic Defi-
cits’: Employment, Autonomy and Alienation in US Film Animation” explores the
tension and trade-offs between definitions and practices of creative freedom and
228 HOLT AND LAPENTA

new forms of control and alienation. While Stahl recognises that the cultural
industries’ dependence on novelty requires granting creative workers significant
degrees of autonomy, he also points out that historical and legal developments
in the US film industry’s employment models have significantly reduced defini-
tions of such autonomy and self-realisation. According to Stahl, the problem
derives from the development of contemporary models of employment that
establish a political framework around employer and employee relations. In
these relations, the latter transfers rights to self-governance and property to the
former in exchange for wages, a sense of embeddedness in occupational commu-
nities, and professional prestige. This is understood by Stahl in relation to a
general problematisation of the definition of autonomy and a more direct and
critical analysis of the hierarchically constituted professional relations within the
industry. New forms of alienation derive from the legal appropriation of employ-
ees’ creative work and intellectual property that enable a re-problematisation
of the “art—commerce contradiction” as an emanation in market society of a
“democracy—employment contradiction”.
Adam Arvidsson’s article (with Giannino Malossi and Serpica Naro), “Passionate
Work? Labour Conditions in the Milan Fashion Industry”, comes out of a collabo-
rative study with lower-level workers in the fashion industry in Milan. Despite the
underpaid, generic, repetitive, and generally “uncreative” nature of their
labour, this “creative precariat” exhibits high levels of job satisfaction and self-
perception. A particular aspect of this industry formation is the important
role of brands as a generic structure and power in the agency and subjectivity of
workers. The authors interpret these apparently contrasting factors as proof
of the development of an ideology of creativity that creates a partial suspension
of the classic labour theory of value in favour of an identity theory of value. In
this theory, work, as well as one’s own value as a worker, is increasingly
conceived in terms of identity and lifestyle. The authors recognise the constitu-
tion of this ideology of creativity as part of a general shift towards a biopolitical
governance of labour, in which the production of value and the production of
subjectivity tend to coincide, and the provision of forms of subjectivity becomes
a way to shape and govern the valorisation process. Such trends towards the
internalisation and rationalisation of the subjective value of creative labour and
immaterial production seem to be, according to Arvidsson, Malossi, and Naro, “a
general feature of the neo-liberal phase of informational capitalism”.
These studies of the California film industry and Milan fashion industry reflect
the conditions of localised formations in the global economy.
These four articles contribute to the founding agenda of this special issue: to
problematise and develop discussions of the concepts of autonomy and creative
labour within the creative industries. The emergence of a creative labour market
has involved the formation of new middle classes and transnational communities
concentrated in urban areas. Despite economic growth in major sectors of the
creative industries, creative labour still plays a small role in theory of social
change in global labour markets. Creative labour is unique in that it differs from
other types of labour. This special issue of the Journal for Cultural Research
 INTRODUCTION 229

provides a further understanding of the unique character of creative labour by

theorising autonomy outside the traditional critiques of cultural studies and crit-
ical theory.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to express their gratitude to the contributors for their extraor-
dinary engagement in the collaboration that led to this special issue. We are also
grateful to the Danish Research Council for the Social Sciences for funding the
conference “Cultural Experience and Production” that kick-started the collabo-
ration. The conference was organised by the Centre for Experience Research at
Roskilde University, Denmark, in collaboration with Jon Sundbo and Jørgen Ole
Bærenholdt.

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