I had a deeply stimulating session with the academics at Cambridge University's CRASSH initiative the other day, discussing the fascinating topic of how much research in the arts, humanities and social sciences can really transfer over to more commercial, creative-industry areas.
As someone who's tried to smuggle all kinds of high-theory into his pop-song lyrics for years now - even if only metaphorically (see paper in extended entry bellow) - I had quite a lot to say about this.
My thanks to Lee Wilson and James Leach, the organiser and chair of the event. The presentation below isn't exactly written according to the most disciplined scholarly standards, but I did avail myself of the university context and cavorted freely and happily in the fields of theory... So casual readers of play, be warned. (And don't worry: the Thorpe Park post is coming soon.)
TAKING REALITY LIGHTLY: THE CHALLENGE OF PLAY TO METRICS OF CREATIVITY
PAT Kane
Presentation to the CRASSH seminar on 'Risk and Innovation',
16th April http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/781/
Download TAKING REALITY LIGHTLY - PDF
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) convened this conference on the theme of risk and innovation, but I was guided in my presentation by this note from CRASSH's research fellow, Lee Wilson:
One of the things that is of concern to us are the effects of the mitigation of risk on Arts and Humanities research. How is risk perceived in relation to the factors used in evaluation of a project? In what ways do modes of innovation differ in Arts & Humanities research? Is an overly instrumental focus on outcomes and impacts as the means of assessing the value of A & H research detrimental to some forms of research that, simply put, is more about process than product?
An important question for us is what kinds of metrics might be used to ascertain different forms value creation, ownership and modes of knowledge in the Arts and Humanities? I had in mind that you could deliver a provocation that perhaps draws on your argument in the play ethic to address the concerns that we have with an overly instrumentalised model of knowledge production and a rather linear conception of creativity and innovation that seems to prevail in current thinking on the necessity to assess the 'impacts' of research.
As someone who – at least in his commercial music career – has never had to fill in a form for public or state funding, and has only ever been "evaluated" by the ticket-buying public (or some disgruntled music reviewers), I found this to be an intriguing question. What exactly was the relationship between 'arts, humanities and social science research', and my own commercial music practice? And how could my parallel thinking in the Play Ethic illuminate this? Helpfully Lee Wilson sent me three papers (a fourth by Bruno Latour I didn't get a chance to read) which laid out the conceptual frame of their discussion. As I quote them heavily in the second part of my presentation, I append them below, available for download:
James Leach - Modes of creativity
Nigel Thrift - Re-inventing Invention
Geoffrey Crossick - Knowledge Transfer Without Widgets
PRESENTATION
In preparing this talk, and with my musician's hat on, I've realised that I've been having a hard-core dialogue between arts and humanities research, and my artistic career, all my adult life
- I set out my first plan to be a musician in the inside flyleaf page of Theories of Authorship by John Caughie. Something about combining "Frank Sinatra" and "Malcolm McLaren"
- Our first two singles were informed by Marcuse (I Refuse – 'The Great Refusal') and Gramsci ('Labour of Love'). My first album title, Seduced and Abandoned, was also the title of a book of essays by Jean Baudrillard (originally to be called 'Ferraris and Dictionaries' – thank god for A&H research). The same album had quotes from Walter Benjamin on the lyrics sleeve, his paragraph about the Angel of History.
- Our second album had songs inspired by a 1989 article from Screen by Bill Nichols on networks ('The Only Thing More Powerful Than The Boss'), Jurgen Habermas's theory of communicative action ('Ordinary Angel').
- Our third album had songs inspired by the Russian formalist theory of estrangement ('Making Strange'), and post-structuralism ('Life As Text')
- Our most recent album Open Soul was explicitly inspired by the open-source movement, one song in particularly, 'Heading for a Fall', weaves the Lacanian idea of the Real into one lyric ("I'm reeling from the Real because it hits me like I run into a wall")
There's also been songs about cars and girls (more trains than cars for us)… But it seems, lyrically at least, I have been drawing direct inspiration from theoretical research in Arts and Humanities for twenty years.
For me, theory was easier to be inspired by than empirical studies. Particularly if you'd read Derrida, you were always looking for the deep structuring metaphor or antinomy in any slab of social theory. And when you extract that metaphor, and it's robust, it can sit in your song like a cognitive time-bomb, waiting to explode in someone's mind. I realise I've been using humanities research and theory in my music the way that much conceptual art uses it – for good or bad.
But my other journey into arts and humanities research has been to write a book which attempted to generalise my experience as a creative person, and see that as an anticipation of technological, cultural and social trends in Euro-American society.
The Play Ethic first came to me as a phrase in the early nineties, in the midst of a rehearsal with my neo-jazz band, in a moment when our drummer re-described his own 'work ethic'. (A few minutes' activity with AltaVista - an early search engine - would confirm that the phrase was hardly original). But as soon as I heard it, I realised that it had enough capacity in it to serve as a headline bringing together a wide range of interests of mine - cultural, technological and political.
Certainly as the Nineties progressed, the idea that computers and networks were making our societies more open, our institutions more transparent, and our civic and creative voices more prominent, began to increasingly excite me. Guided by magazines like Wired and Mondo 2000, and academics like Manuel Castells, I began to explore the nascent Web – exulting both in the diversity of the voices on there, and the increasing possibilities for self-expression.
My 80's experience as a musician, using digital technolgies like samplers and synths, had gotten me used to the idea of information as infinitely malleable, produceable and "playable-with". With the Net, these informational powers promised to spread beyond the artist's enclave, into workplaces, schools and the home.
But how did the heady mass empowerment of the Net sit with the constraints, hierarchies and routines of most life within organisations? Not well, it seemed to me (I had spent a lot of the Nineties in broadcast and press environments, chafing against such limits). The sociologist Daniel Bell has often talked about the "cultural contradictions of capitalism": where industry demands both a docile producer, and a hedonistic consumer, and is perplexed when the desirousness of the second identity saps the duteousness of the first.
I was interested in the cultural contradictions of informationalism. If imagination, mental agility, empathy and passion are the crucial elements that distinguishes one product or service from another these days - and if the Net is the process that coordinates this - then how does that sit with top-down managements which are happiest when demarcating job roles, and counting keystrokes? The reported rates of absenteeism and disillusion among UK workers seemed to indicate the problem – that the "Protestant work ethic", already made shaky by consumerism, was being entirely unravelled by computers and networks.
So for me, "the play ethic" came to seem like a pointer towards how these contradictions might be resolved. What would organisations be like which encouraged creativity, open-ended learning and experiment – the essence of play - as preferred characteristics for their employees or colleagues? What kinds of products, services and actions would these "players" generate? In the late nineties and early oughties, I began to gather and note examples of these players' enterprises – and as I wasn't finding too many of them (as least not this far away from California or Helsinki), I began to reach back into history, and into other disciplines.
Since the publication of the book in 2004, which explored in greater depth some of the multidisciplinary scholarship around play (as well as containing reportage and autobiography), I have become much more interested in play at a theoretical and research level - partly in response to the range of academic interest I have received I agree with scholars like Brian Sutton-Smith and Gwen Gordon that the function of play in adult lives is under-examined - and when it is examined, often misdescribed (as 'trivial', 'kidult', or pure recreation).
Sutton-Smith's evolutionary account of play as "adaptive potentiation" - the capacity of the advanced mammal to energetically test and experiment with various survival and flourishing strategies - is for me a very powerful basis for examining the forms and phenomena of play at all stages in the human life-cycle, and at all levels in human society. (There are indeed other framings of the power of play from the natural sciences - particularly that of complex adaptive systems thinking, as advocated by Stuart Kauffman and Brian Goodwin - which strike me as equally powerful and profound, in recognising the centrality of play to the development of all organisms, not just human.)
Here is a the key quote from the conclusion of The Ambiguity of Play:
Play is a fascimilization of the struggle for survival as this is broadly rendered by Darwin. Biologically, its function is to reinforce the organism's variability in the face of rigidifications of successful adaptation (as formulated by Stephen Jay Gould). This variability covers the full range of behaviour from the actual to the possible. Psychologically, I define play as a virtual simulation characterised by staged contingences of variation, with opportunities for control engendered by either mastery or further chaos. Clearly the primary motive of players is the stylized performance of existential themes that mimic or mock the uncertainties and risks of survival, and in so doing, engage the propensities of mind, body and cells in exciting forms of arousal. It is also very interesting to think of play as a lifelong simulation of the key neonatal characteristics of unrealistic optimism, egocentricity, and reactivity, all of which are guarantors of persistence in the face of adversity.
Or as Sutton-Smith once admirably summarised this in an interview: "The opposite of play isn't work - it's depression".
The title of my presentation – 'taking reality lightly' – is my portmanteau definition of play, as boiled down from play theorists in the European humanist tradition – Plato, Schiller, Huizinga, Sartre, Gadamer, Erikson, the Situationists. But Sutton-Smith locates this 'taking reality lightly' – the mimic or mocking of the uncertainties and risks of survival – deep down in the species being of humanity. Richard Sennett's recent book The Craftsman goes there too. In play, he says, we learn how to be experimenters with the material, and in games we learn how to choose, and imagine, the regimes of mastery that will enrich our lives and societies. "We become citizens through play", says Sennett, "and then we lose it at work".
So for me, seeking a play ethic has been about trying to found a post-work society on the basis of this deeply constitutive aspect of human nature.
Obviously there's a big overlap between my idea of play, gained through this scholarship – as the foundation for a kind of permanent surging experimentalism at the heart of life – and much of the dialogue about creativity that courses through government departments, educational institutions and municipal strategies. But in terms of the problematic of your day – how arts and humanities research should relate to risk and innovation, not just within that research but in what possibilities for non-academic practice it engenders, and how that relationship might be assessed and measure – I wanted to challenge the possibility of a simple 'metric' for that. And from the perspective of someone who sees themselves as a "player", in as profound as sense as I can manage.
Ironically, the next part of my talk is probably a successful – or at least functional – example of the kind of 'knowledge transfer' that's been talked about at this conference already. I'm a father, a partner, a writer/journalist/blogger, a businessman in my own trading company, Blairhill Media, which is managing the current activities of Hue And Cry, a songwriter …all of which means I'm on the run, constantly, and had little time to devote to a fully worked-out paper. So I asked Lee Wilson of Crassh if he could send me a few articles that give me a flavour of this field. I've had a wonderful two days consuming these articles – and if it's ok, given than I'm in Cambridge University and among academics, I'd like to conclude by glossing and commenting on these papers, and relating their theoretical insights to my own commercial cultural practice at the moment.
LEACH: THE COMMANDS OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY
The first piece I was given was by my chair, James Leach, titled 'Modes of Creativity'. As I understand it, James is attempting to specify what he would call a 'Euro-American' appropriative model of creativity, rooted in a conception of creativity as the intellectual act of an individual/individuals upon a material world – a world that remains inanimate until its elements have been recombined or transformed by external mental activity. This conception is the basis of what we might called Western intellectual property and copyright law. Leach compares this mode of creativity to that experienced by Nekgini speakers in the Rai Coast, Melanesia. For me, this was a head-wrenching account of a profoundly non-Western and relentlessly intersubjective world of people and things – an effect which I expect the best anthropology is designed to do for the reader.
But what struck me was actually the possibility that, in the Euro-American techno-culture, an existing middle-ground between these two modes of creativity – one appropriative, one generative – might well be opening up, right in the heart of the network society. But that middle-ground is very tough, complex and ambiguous.
In short, I found myself comparing a lot of James's distinctions between these two wildly different modes of creativity, with what we're trying to do with an online community website we're running around Hue And Cry, called the Hue And Cry Music Club (http://hueandcry.ning.com).
For the Rai Coast people, James says that their "spirits/songs are seen as a resource – a powerful one, as they elicit the currency of kinship, the currency through which affinal (reproductive) relations are managed."
Well, I don't know that we have kinship, or affinal relations managed through our website (although there's a lot of flirting between members). But it clearly struck me that our songs are a resource and currency for friendship and affiliation between our fans. That's exactly how they use these songs, as they surf and morph these ramifying, malleable networks. The strange thing about networked digitalisation, and the way that it's currently challening old ideas of how to commercialise music, is that it's supporting the kind of 'music as social currency' practices that James sees in indigenous societies. There's a kind of resignation about 'the end of music as property' in the music biz – which opens up interesting new opportunities for live performance.
But other things about the Reite people's mode of creativity sounded familiar to me. I quote James again:
For Reite people creativity is a necessary process. Human life does not continue without it. Humanity is not defined by the contingency of creative action (in thought/mental operation) but by the necessity of embodying and acting creatively…
Relations established with others create those others and oneself in the work of differentiation… We come to this insight through the contrast with intellectual property rights, which make creativity into a specific resource, its presence contingent upon certain conditions of emergence. The notion of resource implies scarcity, and scarcity is a measure of value. But creativity is not scarce in Reite. Resources for these people lie elsewhere. People themselves are valuable, not what they produce as objects." (My italics)
Now I'm struck by how similar the idea that "people themselves are valuable, not what they produce as objects" is to the experience of social networking that our site demonstrates and many social network sites do. Certainly, the experience of social networks is of a realm defined by a plenitude of possibities for creative interaction with others, rather than a scarcity. Our Euro-American, rather than just Melanesian, "necessity for embodying and acting creatively" is possibly disclosed by the radically cooperative nature of socio-technical networks. Clay Shirky in his recent book Here Comes Everybody notes that the cheap organising tools of Web 2.0 – their propensity for 'insanely easy group-forming' – are revealing a realm of daily sociability that simply hasn't had the opportunity to express itself in such an organised way before.
Another quote from James:
As Wagner points out, ‘Westerners’ value the objects, the outcomes of creativity: ‘we keep the ideas, the quotations, the memoirs, the creations and let the people go. Our attics ... [and] museums are full of this kind of culture’ (Wagner 1975: 26). In contrast, palems [the groups that the Reite people form] do not last. Torrposts [one of their symbolic objects of exchange] rot away in the bush. Their effect is to maintain separations between people, to distribute ‘creativity’ throughout existence. Intellectual property regimes have the effect, to the contrary, of concentrating creativity in particular individuals, and then in individual kinds of mental operation which amount to forms of appropriation by the subject." [My italics]
In light of this point, wasn't it fascinating to see those recent protests organised against Facebook's explicit 'apprpriation of the subjective flows of its users' sociability? My gues is that the mentality wasn't as much "you're trying to make money our of my stuff', as much as "you're commodifying something which I regard as a record of my sociability with friends and family". It also reminds me of the debates we had in setting up the Music Club – whether to charge a fee or not. The rule-of-thumb for this in e-commerce is that you get a tenth of the possible community membership if you ask people to pay for a service. The intrinsically commons-based nature of the Net compels any web-commercial enterprise to take into account that, at the very least, the cash nexus has to be sensitively handled, or pushed to the margins. There is a default expectation among users that this is a 'cornucopia of the commons' (however much of a 'tragedy' it might be for one's cash-flow!).
My take-away from Leach's paper is that the Euro-American mode of appropriative creativity is already being challenged by open-source production and remix culture. Yet it's the "hybrid" enterprises trying to survive in this environment that concern me – those that balance closed copyright or enclosed and scarce commodities, with open commuity involvement. Other than via a neo-communism, how else can creators find some way to be recompensed for their art?
THRIFT: THE COLD CHILL OF DEPLOYMENT
This brings me to the second paper that Lee forwarded to me – Nigel Thrift's Re-inventing Invention. To me this was almost like reportage of our business model, and about a near to a political economy of play as I've ever read, particularly if play is about 'taking reality lightly'. I could talk all day about this, but I'll confine myself to a few comments.
What Thrift gets absolutely right is the strategic intent of people like myself who are trying to ply my cultural trade, in what he calls "a different kind of capitalist world, one in which a new epistemic ecology of encounter will dwell and have its effects, a world of indirect but continuous expression, which is also a world in which that expression can backfire on its makers".
He also gets it right about what kind of business cultural players, and particularly musicians, are up to in this environment – "from simply the invention of new commodities to the capture or configuration of new worlds into which these commodities are inserted". As the strap-line for our Music Club has it: "Music, Friendship and More for Hue And Cry Fans". The 'And More' isn't accidental…
Another quote: "Consumers have become involved in the production of communities around particular commodities which themselves generate value, by fostering allegiance, by offering instant feedback and by providing active interventions in the commodity itself". That's absolutely accurate about the intentional design, and the eventual usage, of our site. But the key experiential driver of the site is the live experience of watching our band – urging fans to record the gig on their phones, to record themselves at the gig, to create collages that represent their experience.
Professor Thrift puts the relationship between digital plenitude and live experience into his theory as well (he should be a music manager):
In line with the increasing tendency to want to gather invention in wherever it may be found, new time-space arrangements have to be designed that can act as traps for innovation and invention. They are spaces of circulation, then, but, more than that, they are clearly also meant to be, in some (usually poorly specified) way that is related to their dynamic and porous nature, spaces of inspiration incorporating many possible worlds.
Thrift is talking here about the well-designed public centres for science and culture that are opening up to house what he calls the 'brainy classes'. But when we do a gig in Shepherd's Bush Empire, is it "a space of inspiration incorporating many possible worlds" – or an enclosed space in which one artistic experience is dominant? As a songwriter, I'd like to say that there are worlds within and between every song… but some may disagree…
For me this is Thrift at his most spookily descriptive of my project as a musician in the world of indirect but continuous expression:
Design has increasingly therefore become re-cast as interaction design : the design of commodities that behave, communicate or inform, if even in the most marginal way, in part by making them into processes of variation and difference that can allow for the unforeseen activities in which they may become involved or, used for which, may then act as clues to further incarnations. In other words, ‘the success of a design is arrived at socially’ - that is through structured processes of cultural deliberation which massage form…Another way of putting this is that ‘through the activity of design the process of production provides information for itself about itself ’ This is another means of understanding co-creation, of course, as a continual process of tuning arrived at by distributed aspiration.
Our experience of using the modular social networking platform Ning chimes exactly with this. We literally massage the form of this platform, shift one element around, create new ones and kill old ones, in the face of a stream of "unforseen activities" by users that give us clues as how to develop the site. "A continual process of tuning arrived at by distributed aspiration" is precisely descriptive of the relationship between our fans and ourselves through this network – their enthusiasm as they sit at their terminals throughout the country is indeed a "distributed aspiration", and their actions continually tune the music of our site's design and functionality. And to return to Thrift's initial quote: some of that tuning can be in the face of quite severe critiques from fans, not just for how much we're trying to sell them stuff, but sometimes how little (or how wrongly) we're trying to sell them stuff! Trade and commerce become one form of socially-regulated exchange in the Hue And Cry Music Club, among many other kinds of reciprocations, with no prior place in any hierarchy of actions within the site.
But there are points where that co-creation of the Hue And Cry interactive reality is limited or arrested. For example, my brother and I are still wedded to the idea of an CD with 12-15 songs, produced in seclusion by myself and my brother, the result of a silting-up of experience and living, and brought out to the world as a punctual event. As artists, we still want to reserve that old Romantic right to conduct an act of poiesis – rather than be always lost in the cybernetic coils of autopoiesis. And we believe that our fans want that also.
I know what Thrift means when he talks of "a world made incarnate by a co-shaping which is an intrinsic property neither of the human being nor of the artefact", or when he dreams of "an animated economy in which the entities being dealt with are not people but innovations that are constantly trying to multiply themselves, ‘quanta of change with a life of their own’"… a world dependent upon and activated by germs of talent, which are driven by sentiments and knowledge and are able to circulate easily through a semiconscious process of imitation that generates difference from within itself. The world becomes a continuous and inexhaustible process of emergence of inventions that goes beyond slavish accumulation."
I know what he means – or I should say, I know what he memes… But emotionally, do I want to live there? I've rarely been as chilled in reading social theory when I read Thrift on one of the new sensibilities he thinks is worth charting in this new, full-on capitalism. This is a permanent tactical manoevering with the way the world is, an endless 'war of position' in everyday life: all of us interactives in a state of permanent, combative deployment (rather than employment) of one's energies and skills. (Thrift takes his metaphor from the Chinese military ethic of shi).
I returned rather gladly to James Leach's point that our
over-intellectualised model of creativity does not consider how we socially
reproduce that creativity, through families, affective ties, nuturance and
community. For all the excitement of Thrift's non-human, cyborg-style modern consciousness,
I'm still not surprised that most pop songs are about love. Or that some can
present the best and most searching ethical questions you ever heard (or didn't
want to hear).
CROSSICK: SPACES FOR CREATIVITY, NOT "KNOWLEDGE TRANSFERS"
This last paper, by Geoffrey Crossick, Knowledge Transfer Without Widgets: The Challenge of the Creative Economy, is written by someone who you'd want to be in charge of something. He's sensitive and informed about the real processes of creativity. Because I have never really operated in the realm of university enterprise (I was a student Rector of Glasgow University for three years between 1990-93, but that was more about being an advocate for student rights than formulating executive strategy), I was unaware that the model of 'knowledge transfer' in technology circles – the idea that basic research can be spun-off into commercial ventues – was being applied to the creative industries.
I entirely agree with Geoffrey that the process of ideation in creative industries is always already much closer to the 'market', and that much "research" is actually conducted in the scramble to get there. I also agree with this statement: "what is needed is not a system to transfer from one party to another some knowledge that has already been produced, to transfer something that has already happened. But, rather, the need is for a system to create spaces in which something can happen. In the creative industries, much of the time, once it has happened it has already been transferred. That is the compelling difference."
But I did have a laugh when the heretical thought popped into my head – what if arts and humanities departments one day did decide to take intellectual property stakes in the productions and innovations of their graduates? Imagine a media studies student who comes up with the next killer reality-show format. Or an art-school band who translates their understanding of constructivism into their next pop video. Should either department seek to derive a royalty from the outcome of their student's humanistic imaginings?
That sounds counter-intuitive, doesn't it – a denial of how we think humanistic knowledge should circulate in a university (which means, mostly circulating in the heads of students, teachers and researchers). This backs up Geoffrey's admonition to the academic sector: "Universities should be more confident of what they’re good at, and that is developing people not just with the skills to meet today’s needs but also the conceptual abilities and imagination to take risks that will generate what is needed in the future. That is what universities can particularly offer the creative industries." Bravo.
PLAY AND "THE METRICS OF CREATIVITY" QUESTION
I hope what's coming over is that, at least in terms of my own artistic commercial practice, I want arts and humanities research to be as expansive, inspirational and boldly conceptual as it can be. Nigel Thrift talks about theory becoming immanent to the operations of informational capitalism. In my experience, that's absolutely true. But I think the role of theory in my own commercial practice sets a rather strange question to the whole public-funding apparatus that supports arts research.
I've often wondered why I've never gone to any Arts Council or public body for my music. Perhaps it's because I've always run a mile from filling in a form (other than a letter of incorporation, or a contract with a promotor) that would stand in the way of getting one's symbolic construct out into the world. And with our now omnipresent and all-powerful digital platforms (and production technology) to hand, negotiating your way through a funding proposal in order to get your stuff out seems even more unpalatable. Within those reasonably clear commercial and distributional arrangements, you are then free to pour whatever you like into your music – which for me, was the post-post-punk strategy of theoretically and philosophically informed lyrics with the musical resources of soul and jazz. A despairing anomie at the back of the gospel hall. How do you get a grant for that project?
But I'm not (or at least I don't think I am) some crude Hayekian, claiming some kind of epistemic rightness for the cultural marketplace – the market as the bottom-up information system which can only support a truly healthy innovation: the play of contestation trumping the stasis of planning. (Hayek, incidentally, was a great fan of Johan Huizinga). Sutton-Smith's book The Ambiguity of Play is well-titled. In its relentless potentiation of possible moves, play touches the most autonomous and the most dependent extremes of human agency – the Romantic egoist, and the most thrawn gambler; the most progressive educator through play, and the most cynical machiavel in the corridors of power. It would take a wise philosopher-king or queen indeed to be able to imagine a viable governance of play. A characterisation of a playful economy for arts production as primarily a kind of bottom-up, enterprise-driven, chaotic emergence would not be remotely adequate.
Perhaps the policy agenda for infrastructually supporting the diversity of a play society is barely imaginable. In my conversations with Lee in preparation for this event, he put a very blunt rejoinder to me: 'but Pat, what would all this mean to the Treasury?' Let me answer that by way of play theory.
One of the interesting biological moments of play is the moment of complex mammalian development – where the cubs are play-fighting, play-hunting or play-mating with each other, in a delimited space watched over by a semi-distant mother or father. The animals are opening themselves up to possible injury, and even predation, at a vulnerable stage in their existence – but evolution compels them to play, nevertheless, to put themselves through many contingences and variations of behaviour. Yet they do so with some horizon of security around them, some defensible and sufficient realm of resources.
My direct answer to Lee was that the Treasury should be thinking of subsidies for artists' lofts and residence, of sabbatical income as a general civic right, of shorter working weeks without reduction of wages, of municipal wifi and beautiful public spaces, of the abolition of student loans … That is, they should be providing deep, semi-distant, infrastructural support and security for the autonomy of players and creatives, in order that their adaptive variations might flourish endlessly – rather than squeezing them through grant applications which answer too-tightly concieved outcomes, and which exhaust the original inspiration in a welter of bureaucratic categories. Can the State concieve of itself as the distantly observing maternal and paternal lion, innately aware that certain energies and mulitplicities are necessary for the overall development of the citizenry – and that their job is to ensure they happen, without risk and innovation meaning destitution? Can they, in short, resist the idea of a metric for creativity, and support the idea of a welfare and infrastructural grounding for autonomy and play?
So what do players want from arts, humanities and social science research? Players want concepts and explosive ideas, inspiring them to new practice. Universities doing what they do best (though being more open and less pay-walled about their intellectual resources would be appreciated) is of more use to us in our cultural marketplaces than a thousand 'creative industry incubators'.
ends
