on "creative work"

beyond/within production & reproduction

I sell the shadow to sustain the substance.

--Sojourner Truth

Moving to the Bay area three years ago to begin my PhD in literature at Stanford, I was shocked but not concerned by the rhythms of living in Silicon Valley—the ambient panic of living a google-calendar governed life filled with back-to-back meetings seemed to me the problem of the tech founder and the VC employee, not the problem of a humble writer and artist like myself. But the environmental influences of the SF entrepreneurial landscape are hard to escape, particularly on campus at Stanford and spending as much time as I was in the city itself. I found myself trying to structure the fundamentally unstructurable elements of my creative practice—and becoming deeply concerned about creative “output” as a product, rather than delighting in creative listening and expression as a practice. Worse still, I found myself trying to capture and extract my own value as a “creative.” Here, in the uncanny valley, the speculative logic of finance/venture capital which sustains itself by identifying and capturing future sources of value has already turned its gaze from attention as capital/resource to a certain quality of attention as a speculative target.

The SF brand of entrepreneurship has commodified tinkering—“practice” and “play” have been appropriated as a necessary part of the production pipeline towards a “product” or “production.” This is quite a strange paradox—play that is directed towards known outcomes, which doesn’t open new possibility but forecloses it. “Design thinking” in which students are taught how to “brainstorm” to “come up with ideas” that are “solutions” to prescriptive diagnoses of societal and global problems pepper the curriculum—a curriculum which is not only explicitly taught in classes but also ambiently absorbed through the Bay area atmosphere and work culture. It’s a difficult thing to be a “creative” anywhere, but it is particularly difficult to practice a way of moving, thinking, and making that is not oriented towards production and reproduction in the Bay area, particularly when a certain quality of attention itself is detected as a source of value and incorporated into workstreams.

More and more, artists are being pushed to become “creative entrepreneurs”—running studios, stores, and ticketed workshops, where we teach different skills and the artist’s way—which is nothing more or less than a soft, open attention towards all that is around us alongside a willingness to collaborate with what skills we may have. It is a wonderful and lovely thing to teach. And the nature of art is to wish to live on and together—so navigating different systems of distribution (which is almost always tied these days to systems of exchange) is essential work, as native to the work itself as the sculpture of it. But if even I, someone who has my basic necessities covered thanks to my PhD stipend—who doesn’t need to rely on “creative labor” to survive—am feeling stifled and stiffened, I wonder what others who are moving more regularly in the field of tactical economies are feeling.

Coercive digital technologies commodify & capture our attention; coercive social technologies are beginning to identify a quality of supple, tender, and open attention as a site of value—and have choreographed a landgrab and an extraction. This is an existential threat to those committed to sustaining truly creative practices—who are committed to ways of working that generate new possibilities for looking, listening, and being and that explicitly resist reproductive logic (producing for consumption or reproducing existing ways of looking, listening, being). What might it look like to push back against this commodification of open attention and curiosity itself, which encroaches on our relationships with the world and with our practices, our ways of moving in and with the world?

How can one can sustain a creative practice in a production-oriented world? By “creative,” I mean ways of being, working, and playing that generate new and other possibilities, ones which may not serve capital’s interests and which may not easily be consumable. How can we create spaces in which play and creativity can be possible within conditions that demand that what is produced from play be sold—and which now are demanding from those who make their livelihoods from “creative work” the performance of productive play? What possibilities live in this contradiction?

It is a profoundly powerful thing that we are collectively awakening to the importance of play and practice. And it is our destiny that everything new which comes alive, every new awakening and birth, opens its eyes first in the radiant ruins in which we live (the ruins of capitalism, the razed and captured earth). All that is born finds itself already captive, held within an enclosure which is both a womb and a prison. Play is good. Finding this out as prisoners of war means that whatever the fruit of this discovery will immediately be seized—and also that we must find a way to keep doing what is good within where we are entrapped and to know this as freedom.

Writing begins with critique and good writing will end in non-closure: May what began as a diagnosis now shift and transform into questions that ask not after a solution to a problem but which enact a close observation and deep listening to a dynamic that could have only been outlined first with the grasping of criticism. What possibilities live in the contradiction of performative play? What cannot live in such a space and how can we protect these with other practices? What comes more alive when we can see practice itself as a production? What comes loose, unmoored, shifted, arisen in what is both creative and reproductive?