At the risk of getting sentimental, I’d like to say thank-you to my wife, Kathy. Not only for all her support
and encouragement, but because she asked me to mention her.

My dad always used to say, and I’m sure he’ll say it again before the night’s out,

“Being a writer, in particular a poet, is all well and good. But it’s no way to make a living.”

Of course, as in most other things, he’s absolutely right.

Routines are supposed to feel demeaning, to destroy our imaginations. I like routine, perhaps because whatever routines I have are not imposed by anyone else. In Ways of the Hand David Sudnow (1993) reflects on learning to play jazz piano. The routine of practice gives him a baseline from which being creative becomes possible. His fingers learn where they need to be to make certain chord shapes, and that means they know where they need to go next to make certain sounds. Unpredictability — new sounds — relies on this knowing. It’s a process that becomes un-thought, and once it is un-thought, Sudnow says creativity is possible.

Nick Dunn is a freelance shoe designer.He draws shoe after shoe after shoe, tiny variations, maybe 50 at a time.Then he takes a few of the best and refines them. It’s someone else’s job to build a prototype, to make them real. There is joy in seeing the prototype, sure, especially as the trainer moves from the page into three-dimensionality, and Nick is fully engaged in the conversations that make this happen. But the biggest pleasure of his work is in the routine, the repetition and the refinement of the sketches. Nick describes drawing as therapeutic, occupying a calm space beyond thought. Creativity needs the routine; creativity is in the routine; the routine permits flow.

In the sketches, this flow is present in the pencil lines that outline the shape of the trainer, and that mark the details. I didn’t expect from Nick’s description that each idea comes in three sketches, showing the left side, back and top. Whilst he draws on flat, seemingly translucent, paper, the three dimensional trainer that ends up on your foot is already in his imagination. It’s not that routines end up with creativity; to say that would be to viciously misrepresent the experience of controlled, routinised work such as that portrayed in Pravda. It’s that creativity is not well-conceived when it’s seen as a product of free-floating inspiration produced by a romantically starving artist. It stems from practice, skill and routine.

References

1. Austrin, T and West, J (2005) ‘Skills and surveillance in casino gaming: work, consumption and regulation’. Work Employment and Society. 19 (2) 305–326.
2. Braverman, Harry. (1998) Labor and monopoly capital: the degradation of work in the twentieth century. New York : Monthly Review Press.
3. Leidner, R. (1993) Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
4. Sudnow, D. (1993) Ways of the hand: the organization of improvised conduct. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

After all, he’s the man who faked his CV, laying claim to having studied at the University of Perugia, when really he’d attended the (fabulously named) ‘Universita per Stranieri’, a language school. He also did a few in-house nightschool courses at GEC Marconi, though these were spun as having attended “Dunchurch College of Management” on his CV. Is this legitimate creativity to produce distinction in an overcrowded labour market?

Although in Brilliant CV by Bright and Earl, potential employees are reminded that “lying about any aspect of your life during recruitment can be grounds for dismissal if uncovered” (2001: 246), it’s possible that under the new Duncan Smith regime there’ll be more scope for potential recruits to creatively embellish their job applications. After all, if the man at the top can do it…

References

Bright, J. And Earl, J. (2001) Brilliant CV: What Employers Want to See and How to Say it. Prentice Hall.

I recently co-organised an exhibition work : place exploring the experience of work at the University of Essex. We produced a collective artistic intervention to describes the University on ‘What a Day’, the 18th March 2009. We received almost seventy entries into a competition that asked for an artistic representation of the working day. People submitted photographs, poems, videos and sculptures produced alone or with their colleagues. They are funny, revealing and surprising.

image by Idlan Zakaria

So many occupations are represented at a University; its staff have skills as mechanics, researchers, negotiators, managers, chefs, librarians, administrators. work : place explored how these occupations intersect and co-depend. It made visible the complexity of work in a vast organisation by making visible the employees and how they communicate.

criticising compulsory creativity

One reason for this project was to consider scope for creativity in the contemporary workplace. Whilst universities might well be described as part of the ‘creative industries’, by and large the dominance of a romanticised concept of ‘creativity’ as the act of a free individual (see Toynbee, 2000, ch 2 for a critique), renders creativity as something outside of market or employment relations.

Yet management discourses celebrate and push towards creativity as the hallmark of the successful employee, the value added by the reflexive, self-monitoring worker of the 21st Century: see Bilton (2007) or http://www.creativitycentre.com/.

This sort of thing leads Thomas Osborne to describe creativity as a moral imperative: ‘for who could imaginably be against creativity?’ (2003: 508). He describes a doctrinal ‘compulsory creativity’ as something to stand against, for its promotion of compulsory individualism, innovation, self-performativity and the quest for the new.

Orvar Löfgren offers an alternative critique of the unthinking use of creativity as a new means of production as ‘the striking paradox of trying to domesticate the imagination while at the same time trying to preserve its magic aura of unbridled energy’ (Löfgren, 2003: 246). Here the suggestion is that the institutionalisation of creativity risks making it disappear. So, here are Toynbee, Osborne and Löfgren criticising simplistic accounts of the creative soul; they almost convince me that creativity is overrated; just a step away from exploitation.

‘Leaf Cells’, by Mike Fryer

But on the other hand, I’m a hippy and I think people have great capacity to be creative if they feel like this is within the possible for them. And this was borne out by some of my experience on the work : place project. What surprised me was precisely what Toynbee’s critique of creativity as hyper-individualised might have lead me to expect, had I thought it through: that some people felt they could not participate alone. It was not for them, they didn’t have an artistic bone in their bodies. But let them be in a group, let the group not the individual be described as creative, then all sorts of things became possible.

collaborations

We did not suggest that respondents might submit collectively, but 17 were collaborations from those already working together. Some of the productions were a result of the competition being used as an excuse for management to work on ‘team building’, but there are two I’d like to talk about which came from the work groups themselves, as a form of play interrupting the working day.

The first, To Boldly Go came from a team of cleaning staff in one of the university residences. Here, the youngest of the workers is dressed with the accoutrements of her job, and the poem sits alongside, reflecting the engagement of this group of staff with students and the mess that student’s produce.

ready for work

I’m standing here outside the door and offering up a prayer,
That when I walk inside the flat its not messy everywhere.
Have they had a party with food and lots of drink?
Will the washing up be sky high and blocking up the sinks?
Or could there be a budding cook who made a spag bowl for all,
Then dished it out for all his mates and left mine up the wall.
So now I’ll open up the door, I’ll tell you what I find.
Oh the little darlings have been very, very kind…

The second A Crystal Ball Moment is a photograph of a sculpture made by the course records team. Each worker made a model of themselves out of found office supplies, plastic water cups were chairs and the figures were made from blue-tack. Faces and clothes differ, and one of them is glued to the phone. The piece refers to a (creative) problem-solving discussion about procedure.

A Crystal Ball Moment, by Course Records Team

What both of these, and many others, suggested to me is how the possibility for creativity exists because of the existence of the group; it is not embodied in the individual. Toynbee would probably agree with this, but Löfgren would not approve of the project, precisely because it is the work group who in this instance provides the group identity. Osborne, though somewhat curmudgeonly, might see that creativity is far more appealing — “post heroic” and non-romanticised – when it is not seen as an attribute of the individual.

More on work : place in the future. Thanks to the rest of the project team: Karen Bush, Veerle van den Eynden, Gavin Sandercock, Matt Softly, Richard Stock and Dave Suggett.

references

1. Bilton, C. (2007) Management and creativity: from creative industries to creative management. Oxford, Blackwell Pub.
2. Löfgren, O. (2003) ‘The New Economy: A Cultural History’. Global Networks. A Journal of Transnational Affairs, 3: 239–254.
3. Osborne, T. (2003) ‘Against Creativity: a philistine rant’, Economy and Society 32(4): 507–525 .
4. Toynbee, J. (2000) Making popular music: musicians, creativity and institutions. London: Arnold.