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Brouillette, Sarah, Literature and the Creative Economy
Gert-Jan Meyntjens
In Literature and the Creative Economy Sarah Brouillette considers the links between British literature and the new culture of work. She argues that the relationship goes both ways and integrates this reciprocity into the structure of her text. The first part (chapters 1-3) of the book deals with the impact of modern ideas about authorship on the formation of the ideology of the creative economy. The second part (chapters 4-7) examines how texts echo the complex relationships between literature and this relatively new economic domain. What Brouillette essentially suggests is that while the teaming up of (high) literature and commercial interests might seem less and less problematic today, the idea of an autonomous writing is nevertheless still crucial to comprehend our current literary production. In fact, it is precisely the tension between literature as an instrument of the creative economy and literature as autonomous art and site of political resistance that is the productive engine of the texts she discusses.
Brouillette’s approach is indebted to Bourdieu’s sociology of literature. She rightly advocates the importance of considering the context in which texts are produced, promoted, distributed and received. This position is a critical response to the autonomists’ theories she discusses in the first part of her book. After the opening chapter in which she describes the creative turn in UK-governance under New Labour (1997-2010), Brouillette compares creative industries’ guru Richard Florida’s bestselling The Rise of the Creative Class to the theories of (mainly Italian) theorists such as Negri, Lazzarato and Virno. While the latter thinkers are much more ambivalent towards the idea of a happy marriage between creativity and capital, Brouilette nevertheless discerns serious flaws in their views that are similar to the problems we encounter in Florida’s text. Like Florida, the autonomists opt for an approach that is fundamentally de-contextualised. In their view, man has an almost natural tendency to escape the drudgery of routine work in order to “be creative” and to do more self-expressive work. However, by neglecting the historicity of the conception of creativity, the autonomists’ views ultimately risk being more compatible with than critical of the new all-encompassing ideology of creative labour.
Instead of opposing an a-historical notion of creativity and a historically situated organisation of labour (Fordism and Post-Fordism) and arguing that our innate creative tendencies will help us overcome the problems related to today’s neo-liberal workplace, Brouillette sets out to attenuate the stark opposition between creativity and labour and to conceive work and culture as essentially entangled and situated. In so doing, she is firstly inspired by Michael Denning’s engaging views on culture as the result of labour.1 Secondly, and
more prominently, she adopts a sociological approach of literature reminiscent of Bourdieu. This means that she takes into account various aspects of our current literary marketplace2 (the writer’s site of work) in order
to analyse the dynamics at play in the cultural objects that emerge from this same marketplace. In this way,
Literature and the Creative Economy
Sarah Brouillette
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014, hardcover ISBN: 9780804789486 Hardcover
IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 17, No.3 (2016) 116
Brouillette convincingly shows how commercial factors that paradoxically appeal to ideals of authenticity and autonomy are functioning as productive constraints for British authors today.
While Brouillette thus uses the autonomists in order to expose some of the issues she addresses throughout her text (authorship, the erosion between work and leisure, the commercial value of subjectivity), she rejects them on a more fundamental level in favour of an approach that is more historically aware. The importance she attributes to such an historical awareness results not only in the third chapter that traces the genealogy of the current cult of creativity in the works of influential psychologists and management theorists. It also sets the stage for the analyses of literary texts by Aravind Adiga, Monica Ali, Daljit Nagra, Guatam Malkani, Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro in the second part.
Brouillette makes a convincing case for an approach that combines a description of the institutional level with a close-reading of texts. The best instances of this double methodology are the analyses in chapters four and five, in particular the discussions of Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) and Malkani’s Londonstani (2006). In Adiga’s case, she points out how the conflicted conscience of the entrepreneur Balram, The White
Tiger’s narrator and protagonist, reflects the issues that Adiga faces as a member of the creative economy,
most notably the dependence of an elite immaterial working class on an impoverished base of service workers. In the case of Malkani, Brouilette shows how his teenage protagonist Jas’s efforts to appear authentic to his teenage thug friends are a re-working on the part of the author of several issues related to the question of the value of authenticity in the creative economy.
While Brouillette’s interdisciplinary approach has many merits, it also entails fragmentation. More precisely, it gives the impression that the two parts of Literature and the Creative Economy stand relatively on their own, each with its own approach (critical theory – sociology of literature) and subject (the creative economy – literary texts). The most striking instance of this fragmentation is the third chapter devoted to the genealogy of our contemporary conception of creativity. Here one might wonder what, despite its intrinsic interest and its accordance with the author’s emphasis on history, it contributes to the overall argument of the book.
This structural problem notwithstanding, Brouillette has written an enlightening study of important British authors of today. Her approach manages to reveal some of the fundamental stakes that underlie contemporary literature. Most importantly, it discerns the productive potential of that which others consider creativity deadening constraints, namely the demands of the marketplace. In so doing, Brouillette’s work can be situated in the tradition of important contemporary Anglophone thinkers such as Angela McRobbie (2016) (whom she surprisingly enough does not mention) and Susan Luckman (2015), on the one hand, and of French sociologists of literature like Gisèle Sapiro (2008) and Bernard Lahire (2006) on the other hand.
Gert-Jan Meyntjens is PhD student at KU Leuven, where he is researching the topic of writers’ handbooks.
Email: gert-jan.meyntjens@kuleuven.be
1. Denning’s views are reminiscent of Richard Sennett’s cultural materialism exposed in The Craftsman (2007). Surprisingly, while Brouillette refers to Sennett on multiple occasions, she does not mention this aspect of Sennett’s work.
2. Considering her transnational theoretical framework, Brouillette is right in avoiding Bourdieu’s notion of literary field and preferring the more neutral term of marketplace.
3. Considering her transnational theoretical framework, Brouillette is right in avoiding Bourdieu’s notion of literary field and preferring the more neutral term of marketplace.
