<nettime> Report: Creative Labour and the role of Intellectual Property [part 2/2]

[Ned Rossiter <Ned.Rossiter@arts.monash.edu.au>]

[PART 2/2]

MULTITUDES and the EXPLOITATION of NETWORK SOCIALITY

The final question in the survey asked respondents if they thought 
there was a need for workers in their field to become more organised, 
particularly around the impact that IP has on your potential income. 
One person said 'yes', and two others didn't know.  The remaining 4 
respondents took the opportunity to register more developed 
responses. One person stated that 'Musicians need a militant union. 
That said, the old divisions of labour in what are generally 
considered "the creative industries" (really the cultural industries) 
have broken down because of technological changes'. Interestingly, 
this respondent correlates the convergence of different media 
technologies with the demise of the previous markers of class 
distinction premised on the vertical organisation of labour within 
the culture industries.  It has been commonplace since the late-90s 
to hear stories of musical entrepreneurs who simultaneously engage in 
the previously separated activities of production, distribution and 
consumption.  Yet such horizontal organisation isn't without its own 
class distinctions that continue to operate in symbolic, economic, 
and political dimensions.

While the old divisions of labour may have been cast away, at least 
within the advanced economies, this isn't to say that new divisions 
of labour haven't taken their place.  Indeed, the task of identifying 
new divisions of labour within the creative industries and 
informational economies has been one of the key underlying interests 
and motivations behind this report.  Such divisions are invoked by 
another respondent: 'I think the issue is broader than the impact on 
our "potential income" as individual workers - perhaps this is 
already too close to the commodity rhetoric that has permeated the 
creative industries. Part of the problem is that we are taught to 
respond to our projects as personally-owned intellectual products 
that must be protected, so that we can drain the maximum profit from 
their use. This disguises several processes that go into creative 
work. Open source programming networks, for example, reveal other 
ways to interpret and develop our intellectual labours'.

Here we have it then, the return to the classic debate over closed 
regulation vs. open flows within a field of new ICTs.  But there's 
more to it in this instance.  This respondent rightly observes that 
creativity is irreducible to the generation and exploitation of IP. 
Herein lies a key tension that proponents of the Creative Industries 
face with a potential constituency that in the majority of instances 
resides outside the institutional borders of the university or a 
government department of creative industries.  This tension concerns 
the relationship between discourse and identity formation. Just as 
the success of governments operating within liberal democracies 
depends upon getting the right spin, so too does the capacity for the 
Creative Industries project to obtain a purchase with a variety of 
actors that include politicians and government departments, 
university officials, students, academics, and creative producers. 
Redefining the position of the multitude, Negri's (2003) manifesto on 
the correlation between exploitation and creative labour is apposite, 
though in ways that contradict his earlier thesis with Hardt that 
Empire has no outside:

'The concept of the multitude can only emerge when the key foundation 
of this process (i.e. the exploitation of labour and its maximal 
abstraction) becomes something else: when labour starts being 
regarded, by the subjects in this continuous exchange of 
exploitation, as something that can no longer enter the relation of 
exploitation.  When labour starts being regarded as something that 
can no longer be directly exploited.  What is this labour that is no 
longer directly exploited? *Unexploited labour is creative labour*, 
immaterial, concrete labour that is expressed as such.  Of course 
exploitation is still there, but exploitation is of the ensemble of 
this creation, it is exploitation that has broken the common [i.e. 
abstract labour in a wage relation] and no longer recognises the 
common as a substance that is divided, produced by abstract labour, 
and that is divided between capitalist and worker in the structures 
of command and exploitation.  Today capital can no longer exploit the 
worker; it can only exploit cooperation amongst workers, amongst 
labourers.  Today capital has no longer that internal function for 
which it became the soul of common labour, which produced that 
abstraction within which progress was made.  *Today capital is 
parasitical because it is no longer inside; it is outside of the 
creative capacity of the multitude*'. (my emphasis)

Now this a lengthy quotation to be sure, and I elect it at this 
particular moment for its immense richness.  I will attend to Negri 
and Hardt's work on immaterial labour in more detail shortly.  At 
this stage, however, it is worth spending a little time unpacking 
some of Negri's key points, since they are commensurate with my 
larger critique of creative industries and the role of intellectual 
property. It strikes me that Negri is decidedly dialectical in his 
thinking of the relationship between capital and the multitude.  What 
we read here is not talk of indeterminacy, flows and zones of 
indistinction - the primary conceptual metaphors used to describe the 
biopolitical operation of Empire; rather, there is a return to the 
bad old language of dialectics, albeit without the full force of its 
logic. If capital is no longer inside but outside the creative 
capacity of the multitude, such a condition is made possible by the 
fact of its relation with the inside of the multitude.  Capital, 
then, operates as the constitutive outside of the multitude, a 
socio-technical body that, according to Negri, has somehow escaped or 
transcended abstract labour in a wage relation *yet* at the same time 
continues to exist in an immanent relation with capital: 
'exploitation is of the ensemble of this creation'.  So exploitation 
persists, but it is no longer the 'direct' exploitation of abstract 
labour.  Rather, it is exploitation of 'cooperation amongst workers'; 
that is, it is an *indirect* exploitation of that which has become 
'creative labour'.  What does Negri mean by this?  As I read him, 
Negri is suggesting that capital - which supposedly is no longer 
inside - exploits creative labour inasmuch as creative labour 
constitutes (i.e. provides the enabling conditions for) capital's new 
location *outside* 'the creative capacity of the multitude'. What 
Negri is saying, then, is that nothing less than a revolution has 
taken place!

One should never expect a manifesto, or, as this tract is, a 
declaration of independence, to explain too much.4  Manifestoes may 
open up other possible worlds, but it is up to others to realise what 
those worlds might be. To speak of a revolution of our time - of a 
dramatic rupture from a prior order, a transformation that 
historically has been characterised by excessive violence and 
bloodshed - is a mistake.  There has not been a revolution.  Rather, 
capital has transmogrified into an informational mode of connections 
and relations, a mode that does not so much come *after* industrial 
and post-industrial modes of production as incorporate such modes 
within an ongoing logic of flexible accumulation.  Within an 
informational mode of connection, the creative capacity of the 
multitude comprises a self-generating system in which abstract labour 
as a wage relation is not so much replaced - for such a 
sociopolitical relation is in fact very much a reality - as it is 
given a secondary role in favour of what Andreas Wittel terms a 
'network sociality' consisting 'of fleeting and transient, yet 
iterative social relations; of ephemeral but intense encounters'. 
Further:

'In network sociality the social bond at work is not bureaucratic but 
informational; it is created on a project-by-project basis, by the 
movement of ideas, the establishment of only every temporary 
standards and protocols, and the creation and protection of 
proprietary information. Network sociality is not characterized by a 
separation but by a combination of both work and play. It is 
constructed on the grounds of communication and transport 
technology'. (Wittel, 2001: 51)

The conditions of work described here by Wittel join the refrain of 
characteristics attributed to labour in the creative industries as 
seen in studies by leftists(?) such as McRobbie, Andrew Ross, and 
Castells as well as their libertarian counterparts like Caves, 
Florida, Leadbeater, Howkins and Brooks.  While these commentators do 
not all use the term creative industries, they all describe similar 
patterns of labour.  This isn't to say that creative labour is 
universally the same.  Earlier I suggested that we are yet to see a 
study that comparatively maps the national characteristics of 
creative labour.  Perhaps one reason such a study is yet to emerge 
has to do with mistaken view often propagated by creative industry 
commentators, policy makers, new media critics, and global theorists 
alike that the nation-state is obsolete.  One thing a comparative 
study of creative labour in their national locales would reveal is 
the role IP law has at the level of the nation-state.  In accordance 
with the TRIPS Agreement, member states are responsible for 
administering and governing IP law within their respective 
territories.  This is just one layer that distinguishes the 
manifestation of creative labour in one country from the next. Other 
layers, or rather systems of arrangements, are defined by the 
sociopolitical, cultural, institutional and economic peculiarities of 
locales, nation-states and regions and the multiple contingencies 
that articulate creative labour in singular ways.

As I've been arguing, there are two key issues at stake for workers 
undertaking creative labour within informational economies:

1) The mode and form of exploitation.  For proponents of the Creative 
Industries, this consists of the exploitation of IP. Wittel also 
alludes to such a condition, noting that network sociality involves 
'the creation and protection of proprietary information', but he 
refrains from engaging the political dimension of such creation.  To 
the extent that the respondents to my survey provide an index of 
abstract labour in the creative industries, then one can contest 
Negri's claim that creative labour has transcended modern and 
postmodern forms of capitalism that function through the exploitation 
of labour as a wage relation.

2)  However different the articulations of creative labour may be, 
they hold one thing in common: disorganisation.  The history of 
workers' movements is a testament to the force of organisation in 
contesting the exploitation of labour by capital.  The question is, 
can creative labour organise itself within an informational mode of 
connection?

In describing the circumstances from which the multitude emerges, 
Negri comes close to suggesting that creative labour is in fact 
organised: Capital 'can only exploit *cooperation* amongst workers, 
amongst labourers'.5  Hardt strikes a similar tone in his earlier 
work on Deleuze: 'Spinozian democracy, the absolute rule of the 
multitude through the equality of its constituent members, is founded 
on the "art of organizing encounters"' (1993: 110).  As I've 
suggested, Wittel's notion of 'network sociality' may be a more 
useful description of Hardt and Negri's multitude: such a 
socio-technical formation is not so much *directly* exploited 
(Negri), as it is indirectly exploited. 'Content is not king', as one 
Silicon Alley PR brochure in 1999 declared, '... the user is'. 
Capital thus continues to exploit creative labour, since its social 
mode is one of cooperation. If the various studies of creative 
industries have got it right, then such cooperation takes the form of 
emphemerality, fleeting, project-by-project engagements and value 
adding personal relationships designed to enhance network capital. 
The function of the creative worker is not to produce, but to set new 
trends in consumption (see Boris Groys, cited in EU, 2001: 36).

Such activities are depicted well in the documentary film The 
Merchants of Cool (2001), where Douglas Rushkoff narrates the busy 
lives of "trend-spotters" and "cool-hunters" who track down youth 
whose vanguard sensibility for hip-consumerism is packaged and 
choreographed through symbolic affiliations with major brands and 
their vehicles: Sony, Pepsi-Cola, MTV, etc. "Cool" youth, with their 
predilection for creative-consumption, function as underpaid and 
exploited cultural intermediaries for their less imaginative 
compatriots in consumerism.  As Tiziana Terranova notes, this kind of 
operation or process is not about capital 'incorporating' some 
authentic, subcultural form that somehow resides outside of 
capitalism's media-entertainment complex.  Instead, it is a 'more 
immanent process of channeling collective labor (even as cultural 
labor) into monetary flows and its structuration within capitalist 
business practices' (2000: 39).

However, the sociopolitical organisation of creative labour requires 
a radically different impetus that is yet to emerge.  As one 
respondent soberly puts it: 'that organisation is not going to take 
the role of unions as we currently know them, who for the most part 
have no clue'. The respondent elaborates this observation, or perhaps 
it was a perception, with the following example: 'I do know a young 
woman trying to effect change in the union movement in nz and 
organise cinema workers...but finds the entrenched movement 
incredibly uninterested in understanding the desires and motivations 
of the young people working in these fields...which is a prereq for 
representing them adequately'.

IMMATERIAL or DISORGANISED LABOUR?

Maurizio Lazzarato defines the emergent and simultaneously hegemonic 
form of immaterial labour 'as the labour that produces the 
informational and cultural content of the commodity' (1996: 133). 
Lazzarato discerns 'two different aspects' within immaterial labour: 
'On the one hand, as regards the "informational content" of the 
commodity, it refers directly to the changes taking place in workers' 
labor processes in big companies in the industrial and tertiary 
sectors, where the skills involved in direct labor are increasingly 
skills involving cybernetics and computer control (and horizontal and 
vertical communication).  On the other hand, as regards the activity 
that produces the "cultural content" of the commodity, immaterial 
labor involves a series of activities that are not normally 
recognized as "work" - in other words, the kinds of activities 
involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, 
fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public 
opinion' (1996:133; cf. Terranova, 2000: 41-43).  It is this second 
aspect of immaterial labour that most readily corresponds with the 
types of work engaged by those in the Creative Industries.  Note that 
the "content" of the commodity is not the sound of music, the 
image-world of the screen, the flash of animation, etc.  As with 
Wittel, the content for Lazzarato is a social relationship: 
'Immaterial labor produces first and foremost a "social relationship" 
(a relationship of innovation, production, and consumption)' (138).

Hardt and Negri expand upon this definition to include affective 
forms of labour, as found in domestic and service work that involves 
the care of others (2000: 292-293).  Importantly, the concept of 
immaterial labour is not to be confused as labour that somehow has 
eclipsed its material dimension. Hardt and Negri note that affective 
labour, for instance, 'requires (virtual or actual) human contact, 
labor in the bodily mode'.  However, 'the affects it produces are 
nonetheless immaterial.  What affective labor produces are social 
networks, forms of community, biopower' (293). I have no idea how 
such products are immaterial.  Moreover, such an understanding of 
affect obviates an inquiry into the more nuanced concept of affect as 
found in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Massumi.  For 
these thinkers, affect consists of the sensing of sensation.  A 
material dimension is apparent here insofar as the sensing of 
sensation assumes that a process of corporeal transformation and 
de-subjectification is under way.  Thus the "product" of immaterial 
labour in its affective mode is precisely this transformation, which 
is also a change in materiality and the relationship between various 
actants.

Lazzarato, Hardt and Negri are concerned, then, with defining 
immaterial labour in terms of the *product* of labour that is 
immaterial (e.g., knowledge, communication, affect-care, etc.) as 
distinct from its actual undertaking.  It is true that one does not 
sell care as a material product, but rather the image of care. One 
may also the sell the memory of care, but for this operation depends 
upon a medium which still, nonetheless, communicates such  memories 
in the form of an image.  Memory is thus predicated on an image.  And 
images, as we know, saturate the marketplace. Or as Lefebvre once 
observed, 'We are surrounded by emptiness, but it is an emptiness 
filled with signs' (cited in Coombe, 1998: 133).  All images are 
encoded by communications media, and as such they possess a material 
dimension.  Palpable as an image may be, care, in its commercial 
form, is not something that one holds or drives down the street, but 
a service one acquires.  Yet the immaterial labour that produces the 
service of care holds a material dimension.  However, the material 
dimension of this operation of exchange-value tells us something of 
great significance vis-a-vis the commodity object.  What, in fact, is 
occurring in this relation of exchange is nothing less than the 
de-ontologisation and deterriorialisation of the commodity object 
itself.  I am speaking here of a question of boundaries and a 
question of time; in short, a question of the limits of capital.  It 
is a category error to understand the commodity object as a "thing in 
itself".  When the commodity object is situated, as it is, within a 
system of social relations, the extent to which it becomes 
intelligible is only possible in terms of a social relation.  That 
is, the commodity object is simultaneously constituted by and 
conditions the possibility of the contingencies of a social system. 
It is impossible, then, for the commodity object to be extricated 
from this system.  To do so is to speak of a utopia, the utopia of 
post-capitalism.  Were such world to actualise, it would not feature 
a role for the commodity object.

Because the concept of immaterial labour is open to various abuses, 
misunderstandings (my own included), and complex intellectual 
filiations, I suggest that it be dropped within critical internet, 
cultural and information theory in favour of a concept of 
disorganised labour.  Creative and informational modes of labour as 
they currently exist are better understood as disorganised; by 
conceiving work in this manner, the political dimension of labour is 
retained insofar as opposition and revolution have in modern times 
required workers to either self-organise or form a compact alliance 
with intellectuals, who have formed the symbolic spearhead of 
political change.  Granted, our times consist of post-Fordist modes 
of production, exchange and accumulation integrated with 
informational modes of connection, all of which have seen the steady 
erosion of organised labour.  Even so, there persists an ineradicable 
class dimension to labour and the uneven distribution of capital. 
>From these conditions, the re-organisation of labour is possible. 
And while the failures of revolution are well documented and acutely 
experienced by many, and the problems of political and symbolic 
representation clearly theorised in the work of Baudrillard, Spivak, 
Balibar, Mouffe and others, there remains the need - perhaps greater 
than ever before - to retain a sense of the importance, a sense of 
the urgency, for labour to have the means and the potential to 
organise itself.

The distinction between conceiving labour as immaterial or 
disorganised has implications not only at the level of political 
theory.  While Hardt and Negri's book Empire has without question 
captured a latent structure of feeling simmering within many leftist 
movements, it is now time to extend that political momentum in ways 
that go beyond the partisan interests of "the multitude" and engage 
workers at the local level of their everyday institutional 
circumstances.  The condition of disorganised labour corresponds, of 
course, with the disorganised technics of capitalism, as discussed by 
Lash and Urry (1987).  Lash and Urry (1994: 10) suppose that the 
different temporal modes by which organisations and technologies 
operate conditions the possibility of disorganised capitalism.  They 
associate a decline in national institutions and their capacity to 
regulate flows of subjects and objects within a national frame with 
the end of organised capitalism.  While they seek to go beyond a 
dualistic mode of thinking, they in fact reproduce such a mode: 
'Disorganized capitalism disorganizes everything' (1994: 10).  As 
rhetorically appealing as this slogan may be, such a blanket approach 
to the complexity of contemporary capitalism precludes the 
possibility of labour organising itself in multi-temporal ways 
through various media of communication in conjunction with the 
cultural peculiarities of socio-institutional locations.  Crucially, 
the exploitation of creative labour continues as what the autonomists 
have called 'a theft of time'.  The possession of time by any kind of 
worker is the condition of possibility for the organisation of labour.

The failure of Negri, Lazzarato and others who gather around the 
concept of immaterial labour is, quite remarkably given their 
respective intensely political life experiences, a failure to 
understand the nature of "the political".  The concept of immaterial 
labour, in its refusal to locate itself in specific 
discourse-networks, communications media and material situations, 
refuses also to address the antagonistic underpinnings of social 
relations.  As Marx so clearly understood, capital is first and 
foremost a social relation (this, the autonomists know well).  This 
remains just as true today for those engaged in intellectual and 
service industries - tiers of labour that, in their state of 
disorganisation, of course hold intimate connections with other 
sectors of work no matter how abstracted they may be from one another 
in geographical, class, cultural, economic and communicative terms.

There is a remarkable correspondence between Hardt and Negri and 
other "radical" Italians on immaterial labour and the disorganised 
multitude, and the kinds of views put forward by many proponents of 
the Creative Industries such as Florida, Caves, Leadbeater, Brooks, 
Howkins, the National Research Council of the National Academies (US) 
and their Australian counterparts.  If there is a perception that 
Hardt and Negri et al. offer a structure of feeling for the renewal 
of left politics and activism and that Creative Industries is, 
broadly speaking, an extension of Third Way ideology and 
neoliberalism with a softer face, then the similarities between these 
two camps are in some respects greater than their differences.  The 
variegated system of disorganised labour within creative industries 
and informational economies is homologous, I would suggest, with 
Hardt and Negri's "multitude"6; organised labour is seen by Hardt and 
Negri as an obsolete, politically limited vestige of a socialism 
constituted by industrial capitalism.  The promotion by the Creative 
Industries of "individual creativity and skill" at the expense of the 
social relations that make both individual and collective activities 
possible corresponds at a discursive level with neoliberalism's 
"customisation" and atomisation of the subject, or what Brian Holmes 
(2002) deftly diagnoses as "the flexible personality".  Furthermore, 
in isolating the networked individual as the unit of creative 
production there is an implicit hostility within Creative Industries 
to the concept of organised labour, the practice of which has 
historically placed demands on capitalists for fairer and more 
equitable working conditions. Creative Industries is far from alone 
here.  As Justin Clemens argues, the affirmation of bricolage, 
mobility, and heterogeneous subcultural styles so typical within many 
Cultural Studies 'accounts unfold[s] on the basis of a prior covert 
*identification* of organization with authority, and authority with 
oppression' (2003: 174).7  Surely it is time to get over such 
hostility toward the dark phantasm of organisation?

Unions today not only have increasingly limited purchase on 
governments with neoliberal dispositions, they also have limited 
appeal for younger workers whose political ideologies have emerged 
within a neoliberal paradigm and whose social experiences are not, 
for the most part, formed within the institutional cultures offered 
by union movements, as has been the case for older generations.  Just 
as Hardt and Negri dismiss 80s and 90s postmodernism for its 
collusion with corporatist culture (and there is much merit in this 
thesis, as documented more succinctly by Thomas Frank), so too their 
own multitude is entwined within the arguably more accentuated 
managerialism of creative industries, where labour continues its 
transformation into surplus value, only this time in the form of 
intellectual property -- a socio-juridical form that lends itself 
more readily to the technical system of electronic stock markets and 
financial speculation than it does to a radical politics.  Though 
here, of course, one finds the counter-forms of p2p file-sharing, 
tactical media and open source movements; digital piracy of software, 
music and new release cinema; clones of drug, technical and GM food 
patents, etc.  The extent to which these counter-practices can be 
called a politics in the sense of an organised intervention into 
hegemonic regimes is, however, questionable and needs to be assessed 
on a case by case basis.  Is digital piracy, for example, a political 
act or just a business strategy by less powerful economic actors in 
their efforts to circumvent transnational corporate monopolies and 
the legal regimes and trade agreements that advance corporate 
interests?

CONCLUSIONS

At the start of this report I sought to make a case for a processual 
media empirics as distinct from the new media empirics.  The former 
is concerned with analysing and being a part of the movements and 
modulations between the conditions of possibility and that which as 
emerged as an object, code or meaning within the grid of the present. 
The latter is primarily interested in delimiting the field of 
movement, and stabilising the object of study as an end in itself. 
Processual media theory does not dispense with the empirical, rather 
it is super-empirical.  But its mode of empiricism does not conform 
to the logic of immanence as expounded by Lash in his book Critique 
of Information: 'The global information society has an immanentist 
culture, fully a one and flat world culture.  As such, its regime of 
culture is radically empiricist' (2002: 167).  The world Lash 
describes is not one that contains the wonders, difficulties and 
complexities of life.  Nor for that matter is the world Hardt and 
Negri call Empire: 'In this new historical formation it is thus no 
longer possible to identify a sign, a subject, a value, or a practice 
that is "outside"' (2000: 385).  Today's media-information cultures - 
the situation of creative labour - are indeed characterised by 
reflexive non-linear systems; they do not, however, eschew their 
constitutive outsides.

In his essay on Blanchot, Foucault notes that 'Any reflexive 
discourse runs the risk of leading the experience of the outside back 
to the dimension of interiority; reflection tends irresistibly to 
repatriate it to the side of consciousness and to develop it into a 
description of living that depicts the "outside" as the experience of 
the body, space, the limits of the will, and ineffaceable presence of 
the other' (1990: 21).  Further: 'it risks setting down ready-made 
meanings that stitch the old fabric of interiority back together in 
the form of an imagined outside'.  Such a mode of reflexivity is one 
that Lash and Beck attribute to "first modernity".  It is a mode of 
reflexivity that is anterior to a processual understanding of 
communication, where transformation, agonism and change are integral 
the operation of reflexivity.

Processual reflexivity is the operative mode peculiar to 
quasi-subjects and quasi-objects situated in socio-technical 
arrangements and conditioned by the accumulation of knowledge, 
experience and sociopolitical and economic forces.  It is a reflexive 
mode that 'must not be directed toward any inner confirmation - not 
toward a kind of central, unshakable certitude - but toward an outer 
bound where it must continually contest itself' (Foucault, 1990: 
21-22).  Or as the philosopher, writer and teacher of architecture, 
Hélène Frichot, recently expressed in my backyard, 'creativity is an 
ungraspable outside'.  As such, creativity cannot be generated in 
order to be exploited in the form of IP, yet the lives in which 
creativity subsists certainly can be exploited.

So how, we might ask, can a para-radical, all-too-social politics be 
created as organised labour within informational media ecologies? 
Zizek is only partly right when he declares with typical impudent 
brio that 'the key Leninist lesson today is that politics without the 
organizational *form* of the party is politics without politics' 
(2002: 558).  The time for parties is over!  Go to your next Creative 
Industry bonding session if you want to play with cherry-flavoured 
vodka.  It is now time for modest, pragmatic engagements with 
localised networked politics.  The challenge of political 
organisation is a challenge for all critical creative workers as they 
reside in the form of networks, not the party.


* A special thanks to all respondents to my survey - you made this 
writing possible!


APPENDIX 1

Rossiter, Ned. 'POS: intellectual property' [survey questionnaire], 
posted to fibreculture mailing list, 30 June (2003). Available at:
http://lists.myspinach.org/archives/fibreculture/2003-June/003106.html

(and by all means, keep sending me your responses!)

NOTES:
1. Florida does go on to discuss IP, but not in terms of how its 
exploitation defines creative industries, as the CITF Mapping 
Documents of 1998/2001 have it.

2. My quarrel here is not with Deleuze's concept of a logic of 
immanence but rather with Lash's (2002) shorthand version of it, 
which conveniently elides the conceptual - and ultimately political 
and ethical - nuisance of thinking through the operation of the 
constitutive outside *within* a logic of immanence.

3. As QUT's 'Intellectual Property Policy' document states: 'In the 
absence of any agreement or assignment varying this position, QUT is 
not entitled to the ownership of intellectual property created by a 
student in the course of study at QUT. However, QUT may place 
conditions on student enrolment or participation in courses, subjects 
or projects, so that a student assigns to QUT ownership of 
intellectual property created, either generally or by reference to 
specified criteria. In such cases, students must be fully informed in 
relation to any potential restrictions on publication in accordance 
with QUT's Code of Good Practice for Postgraduate Research Studies 
and Supervision'.
http://www.qut.edu.au/admin/mopp/Appendix/appendix22.html

4. As it happens, the genre of Negri's piece is quite different.  As 
the transcriber and translator, Arianna Bove, informs me: 'maybe it 
sounds like a manifesto because it was an oral intervention, the 
context being one where in my view Negri was questioning the idea of 
a 'public sphere' which Virno seems to hold onto, albeit in a 
modified form, in some of his writings'. Personal email, 29 
September, 2003. Negri's intervention took place in  a seminar called 
'Public Sphere, labour, multitude: Strategies of resistance in 
Empire', organised by Officine Precarie in Pisa, with Toni Negri and 
Paolo Virno, coordinated by Marco Bascetta, 5th of February 2003. 
The version that appeared on make world 3 is slightly edited, and the 
word-by-word transcript (with part of Virno's response) translated is 
here: http://www.generation-online.org/t/common.htm

5. The notion of cooperation is related to the other autonomist key 
concepts of the "general intellect" and "mass intellectuality".  See 
Virno (1996) and Lazzarato (n.d.).  For a discussion of these terms, 
see Terranova (2000: 45-46).

6. Here I am drawing on Timothy Brennan's (2003) critique of Hardt 
and Negri's Empire, though Brennan is making a comparison between 
immaterial labour and the multitude.  As I've argued above, the term 
immaterial labour is one that I see as conceptually flawed, and is 
better described in terms of disorganised labour.  For their part, 
Hardt and Negri (2003) are disappointing in their response to what 
they fairly address as Brennan's aggressive critique inasmuch as it 
is heavy on taking a point-by-point refutation of Hardt and Negri's 
thesis and some examples, yet offers little by way of an alternative.

7. Many of the key proponents of the Creative Industries, at least in 
Australia, have had prior intellectual lives and academic careers 
studying precisely these sort of cultural phenomena.


SITES

Australasian Performing Rights Association (APRA), http://www.apra.com.au/

Australian Trade Union Archives, http://www.atua.org.au/atua.htm

Creative Industries Task Force (CITF),
  http://www.culture.gov.uk/creative/mapping.html

The Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology 
(QUT), Brisbane, Australia, http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com

Fibreculture 2003 Brisbane meeting, 
http://www.fibreculture.org/conferences/conference2003/index.html

Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA incorporating Australian 
Journalists' Association (AJA)), http://www.alliance.org.au/

National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), http://www.nteu.org.au

Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD),
http://www.oecd.org/home/


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