Assemblages of creativity: Material practices in the creative economy

Abstract

This article questions the anthropocentrism of existing treatments of creative work, creative industries and creative identities, and then considers various strategies for overcoming this bias in novel empirical analyses of creativity. Our aim is to begin to account for the nonhuman, ‘more-than-human’, bodies, actors and forces that participate in creative work. In pursuing this aim, we do not intend to eliminate the human subject from analysis of creative practice; rather we will provide a more ‘symmetrical’ account of creativity, alert to both the human and nonhuman constituents of creative practice. We draw from Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the assemblage to develop this account. Based on this discussion, we will define the creative assemblage as a more or less temporary mixture of heterogeneous material, affective and semiotic forces, within which particular capacities for creativity emerge, alongside the creative practices these capacities express. Within this assemblage, creativity and creative practice are less the innate attributes of individual bodies, and more a function of particular encounters and alliances between human and nonhuman bodies. We ground this discussion in qualitative research conducted in Melbourne, Australia, among creative professionals working in diverse fields. Based on this research, we propose a ‘diagram’ of one local assemblage of creativity and the human and nonhuman alliances it relies on. We close by briefly reflecting on the implications of our analysis for debates regarding the diversity of creative work and the character of creative labour.

So much of creativity, of being creative, is about community and the value of being with other people. That’s really the pleasure of creating. Like how many people, and how many ideas and materials or techniques can you bring into it [creative practice] before, during and afterwards you know? But it’s not easy. When I was in a set of studios where I was expecting to find a community and actually I think largely because of the architecture of the studios no community formed, despite everyone’s best efforts, I’d spend like seven hours a day with my Skype window open to my brother who was living in New York who’s also an artist, and we would just consult each other continuously. And he would go out for a run and I would go and have lunch and we’d sometimes coincide in front of the screen. It [Skype window] was like another room in the studio that I never went into, and vice versa for him, but that’s how we maintained a sense of community and consulted each other on our practice. It was like a portal that was opened onto the other side of the world for us. (Melissa, 36, artist, Melbourne)

Herein lies a ‘diagram’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 91–93) of an assemblage of creativity – Melissa/laptop/software/Internet/space/family/talk each becoming creative in the convergence of heterogeneous forces, human and nonhuman. Creative practice subsists in the affective, social and material connections forged between these bodies, forces and spaces as they encounter one another, becoming effective, becoming creative, enabling capacities while foreclosing others. Creativity is a function of an assemblage like the one described by Melissa. It is not an attribute of specific individuals. Everywhere, everyday, individuals become capable of creative practices, even though the means of this creativity are often left to romantic evocations of the qualities and talents of unique individuals, ‘creative people’ (Hesmondhalgh, 2012). As a result, contemporary accounts of the character and variety of creative work in the cultural and creative industries typically emphasise the human subject of creative practice. Creativity is regarded either as an inalienable attribute of creative individuals (Bridgstock, 2011) or as a function of novel collaborations among creative people (Cropley, 2006). This article questions the anthropocentrism of existing treatments of creative work, creative industries and creative identities, and then considers various strategies for returning ‘the missing masses’ (Latour, 2005: 241) to empirical analyses of creative work.

Our aim is to begin to account for the nonhuman, ‘more-than-human’ (Braidotti, 2013: 1–3), bodies, actors and forces that participate in the production of creative work. In pursuing this aim, we do not intend to eliminate the human subject from analysis of creativity and creative practice; rather we will attempt to provide a more ‘symmetrical’ (see Law, 2004: 101–104) account of creativity, alert to both the human and nonhuman constituents of creative practice. We draw from Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) discussion of the assemblage to develop this account. Based on this discussion, we will define the creative assemblage as a more or less temporary mixture of heterogeneous material, affective and semiotic forces, within which particular capacities for creativity emerge, alongside the creative practices these capacities express. Within this assemblage, creativity and creative practice are less the innate attributes of individual bodies and more a function of particular encounters between human and nonhuman bodies (Wilkie et al., 2010). Creativity, in other words, is a function of the entire assemblage and not any one body or force within it (Mar and Anderson, 2010). We will ground this discussion in qualitative research conducted in Melbourne, Australia, among creative professionals working in diverse fields. Focusing on a single case drawn from this research, we propose a diagram of Melissa’s assemblage in order to draw out the human and nonhuman alliances all (creative) assemblages rely on. Akin to a formal case study, this approach will enable us to begin to specify the processes, interactions, practices and associations by which creativity is expressed within an assemblage as a ‘singular’ quality (Deleuze, 2003: 10). We close with some brief reflections on the implications of our analysis for recent discussions of the work of creative practice and the diversity of creative labour in the modern creative economy.

Creativity and innovation

Creativity and innovation, latterly assumed to be mutually constitutive (Bilton and Cummings, 2014: 15), are increasingly understood as indispensible conditions of progress and economic prosperity in contemporary neo-liberal economies (Flew, 2011; Florida 2002). Across the developed and developing world, social and economic policies position creativity and innovation as necessary drivers of prosperity and as invaluable outcomes of progressive (or efficient) policy arrangements (Prince, 2014). Creativity, in these respects, is both the condition and the intended outcome of much contemporary social and economic policy-making in many countries (Canniford and Bajde, 2016). Meanwhile, the value of creativity is lauded across almost all aspects of social and economic activity. It is commonly assumed to underpin the introduction of newer and more profitable commodities, services and administrative arrangements (Styhre, 2006); it facilitates new work practices, organisational procedures and management approaches (Flew, 2011); just as it is taken to drive the policy innovation required to tackle endemic social problems such as homelessness, unemployment, addiction and mental illness (Fox, 2013). Positioned in these ways, creativity, and its valorisation in policy and practice, is central to the reorganisation of great swaths of work and employment, giving rise to various cultural and creative industries and the ‘creative classes’ these industries employ (Florida, 2002). More directly, the creative industries serve to organise, manage and reward creativity and creative work in the normal course of cultural and creative production (see Hesmondhalgh, 2012: 6–10). While creative work is linked to the emergence of a distinctive class of creative practitioners, this labour is increasingly integrated into the working lives of individuals across a broad range of industries and occupations as the organisational and economic logic of innovation comes to frame an ever wider array of social and economic endeavours (Prince, 2014).

Our point in drawing attention to these widely discussed features of contemporary social and economic activity is to highlight their reliance on notions of human resources and human capital. This is as true of scholars and policy-makers for whom the creative economy is vital to innovation and improved economic performance, as it is for critics wary of the rise of a new ‘precariat’ (Standing, 2011) based on the exploitation of ‘creative subjects’ in cultural and creative production. Either way, creativity is reified as a uniquely human attribute, as something select individuals working alone or in small groups manifest as a result of particular aesthetic, cognitive, affective and social skills (Flew, 2011). Indeed, the logic of cultural and creative production relies on the ‘instrumentalisation’ of these skills and their transferability in increasingly global market transactions (Prince, 2014: 90). According to this logic, creativity may be isolated as a distinctive attribute of select individuals, and these skills may then be codified, organised, managed and exploited in the course of generating enduring profits from cultural and creative production (Potts, 2011). Whether these skills are regarded as innate or acquired, entire bureaucratic and educational apparatuses have emerged to instruct, inspire and cultivate the individual talents of creative professionals (Bridgstock, 2011; Bridgstock et al., 2015). These novel pedagogies of creativity and creative practice may have emerged largely in response to the demand for creative talent in diverse labour markets, but they have also helped to codify and delimit the character and conduct of creative practice and the measure of its instrumentalisation in creative work (Prince, 2010).

We should stress that we do not deny that human subjects are intimately embedded in creative practices, nor that creativity may be said to be a particular attribute of a given individual or group. However, we would argue that such claims necessarily require the exclusion of each of the nonhuman material, semiotic and affective forces active in any instance of creativity or creative practice (see Deleuze, 2003: 15–19). Creativity may only be restricted to human subjects by ignoring the role of nonhuman, ‘more-than-human’, forces in creative life. Yet as we shall elaborate below, this argument is not merely a call for greater recognition of the role of materials, bodies and forces in creative practice. Technical objects, instruments, materials and devices ought to be given their due in accounts of creative practice. After all, a painting is as much a force of canvas, timber, brushes, light and space, and the hue, viscosity, temperature, saturation and intensity of paint as it is a subjective function of the artist’s desire or intention. Yet it is important to acknowledge that studies of the role of material objects and practices in the expression of creativity risk reducing material objects to mere artefacts or instruments of expression – intermediaries and not true mediators in Bruno Latour’s (2005: 37–39) technical vocabulary – unless their role in transforming the character and limits of creative expression itself is duly appreciated.

To persist with Latour’s (2005) distinction between intermediaries and mediators, to treat canvas, brushes and paint, for example, as intermediaries, is to assert that they make no difference to the creative moment. It is to argue that these material entities ‘transport meaning or force without transformation’ (p. 39). They merely convey the artist’s aesthetic intentions without themselves affecting these intentions. Mediators, on the other hand, ‘transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry’ (Latour, 2005: 39). The paint makes all the difference to the painting in other words. Yet if they are not ignored altogether, the material, nonhuman, more-than-human, constituents of creative practice are almost always treated as intermediaries in scholarly accounts of creativity (see Wilkie et al., 2010). The elision of the mediating force of material entities, of the nonhuman constituents of creative practice, is common in most studies of creative work. Reaching back to Howard Becker’s (1974) seminal account of the social (or collaborative) aspects of creative practice, one finds numerous references to the ‘equipment, materials and training’ involved in these practices and to the instruments and conventions of musical notation common to musical performance in particular (p. 772). While, characteristically, Becker appreciates the technical constraints and opportunities different material objects may avail in the course of creative composition – his analysis of the work of Harry Partch who invented a new musical scale of 42 notes between two octaves (rather than the 12 notes of the common chromatic scale) along with the instruments to play these microtones, is especially revealing in this regard (see Becker, 1974: 774) – Becker’s analysis of creative practice almost always emphasises its social features, with the necessary corollary that art is almost always a function of human collaboration.

We would argue, however, that many other forms of collaboration are implicated in Becker’s analysis. For example, in discussing Partch’s music Becker might have emphasised how the novel instruments required to emit the microtones present in Partch’s 42 note scale themselves transformed how his music was composed and reproduced, how the materiality of creative practice changed as a result of this material innovation. In this respect, it is arguable that the micro-tonality of Partch’s scale is as much a function of the material instruments required to emit these microtones, as it is a function of Partch’s own aesthetic innovation. Ignoring these material aspects, Becker’s (1974) analysis focuses instead on the human resources necessary to perform one of Partch’s musical scores, such as the long training musicians require to learn how to play Partch’s instruments and to read his scores (pp. 772–773). Similarly, Becker (1974) refers to how the innovative use of vibrato was introduced by some string instrument players and composers to ‘heighten tension and create [an] emotional response’ in an audience, without acknowledging that vibrato, or the capacity to modulate a note’s pitch, is a material capacity of stringed instruments, which varies greatly from instrument to instrument (p. 773). For example, the ‘Texas Blues’ guitarist Lightnin’ Hopkins was well known for tuning his guitar one whole tone below concert pitch in order to significantly increase the guitar’s capacity to produce vibrato, given the reduced string tension at a lower tuning pitch. In this example, vibrato may be treated as a material property of a given instrument (Lightnin’s famous Gibson J-45 acoustic guitar in this instance), which itself helps to frame the range of ‘emotional responses’ a piece of music may be able to elicit, which is to say that the vibrato is in the strings and the body of the guitar as much as it is in the player’s fingers (see Duff, 2016). This is to treat the guitar as a material mediator that transforms music as a medium of expression and not simply as an intermediary that conveys, without affecting, a musician’s ideas or moods.

It is necessary to point out, however, that the analytical approach to creative practice pioneered by Becker has largely been maintained by subsequent generations of scholars. This is also true of approaches to the analysis of creativity in organisational studies (see Canniford and Bajde, 2016; Sundgren and Styhre, 2007). In keeping with much wider engagement with questions of creativity and innovation across the social sciences (see Cropley, 2006; Prince, 2014), scholars within organisational studies have largely focused on investigating the character, extent and utility of creative practices within diverse organisational settings, with particular attention to the ways these practices have been understood and promoted as sources of innovation within organisations (Flew, 2011: 76; also Potts, 2011: 1–3). Whether critically or more enthusiastically, this research generally traces the slow emergence of discrete cultural and creative industries, the role of social and economic policies and incentives in the rise of these industries, and the impact of these policies on creative practitioners (see Bilton and Cummings, 2014 for a review). Another key focus has been the role cultural and creative industries serve in generating and sustaining apparatuses, techniques and practices for the production and circulation of ‘cultural texts’, which help to define and stabilise the character and meaning of ‘creative practice’ (Hesmondhalgh, 2012). This work has served to clarify the character and organisation of specific cultural and creative industries and the creative labour these industries support.

In pursuing these lines of inquiry, research in organisational studies has contributed important accounts of organisational practices and policies for identifying and promoting creativity in specific local, national and global settings (Mann and Chan, 2011). It has also provided evaluations of national and sub-national strategies to achieve these goals and analysed their impact at the organisational level in specific cultural and creative industries (Flew, 2011). The broader aim of this research has often been to determine how organisations (or spaces of activity) may promote creativity and innovation in terms of novel human resource management, organisational policies and structures, leadership and staff support. Aligned with this focus has been interest in the specific dispositions and practices managers ought to adopt in leading organisations through periods of social, political and economic uncertainty (Bilton and Cummings, 2014: 4–9). Observing these developments, scholars have noted how the social, political and economic value of creativity is shifting from older understandings of ‘non-productive labour’ (Potts, 2011: 23) towards a focus on the role of creativity in driving innovation in product development, service delivery, human resource management and strategic planning (Bilton and Cummings, 2014; Prince, 2014). More recently, these findings have been taken up and extended by scholars interested in the practice of creativity across a broader sweep of social and economic activities, often generating similar conclusions regarding the conflation of creativity and innovation in organisational practice (Howkins, 2011: 1–10).

What is most notable about this research for our purposes is its general indifference to the material conditions of creativity and creative practice, as we have already noted. Despite widespread interest in the cultures and ecologies of creative practice (see Flew, 2011; Howkins, 2011), these cultures and contexts are almost always pressed into the service of the human subjects of creativity. Ecologies and contexts may well shape the character and distribution of creative practices, and yet these contexts are typically conceptualised as complex aggregations of (human) norms, attitudes, practices, dispositions and relationships (Styhre, 2006: 145–147). The human aspects of creativity and innovation are already the focus of near exhausted scholarly and organisational inquiry. We see much promise in opening up these lines of inquiry to include greater interest in the nonhuman, more-than-human, constituents of creative practice. This shift may partially be justified in terms of recent interest among organisational scholars in the implications of posthumanism and the ‘affective turn’, science and technology studies and new materialisms (among cognate intellectual developments) for research innovation in organisational studies (Canniford and Bajde, 2016; Prince, 2014; Thanem, 2011). In this vein, our focus in this article ought to be read as part of a more general effort to work through the implications of posthumanism, the affective turn and science and technology studies for organisational research.

Greater recourse to the ‘assemblage thinking’ inaugurated by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) ought to avail new conceptual resources for this task. In the context of this study, this approach should help to overcome the anthropocentrism common to most accounts of creative work and provide a more symmetrical assessment of the human and nonhuman constituents of creative practice. Before turning to our empirical material, we will review Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the assemblage, along with Manuel DeLanda’s instructive commentaries on this account, and briefly indicate how assemblage thinking has been taken up in recent organisational research.

What is an assemblage?

The assemblage offers a novel unit of analysis for empirical inquiry and theoretical speculation (Duff, 2014). It is primarily concerned with contesting and recasting the ontological and epistemological separation of the human and the nonhuman in social, political, economic and philosophical treatments of social organisation (DeLanda, 2006: 3–5). Assemblage thinking achieves this goal by abandoning the notion of a foundational human subject and then by refusing to reify any essential ontological distinction between the human and the nonhuman (Roffe, 2016: 42–43). In its simplest definition, the assemblage may be said to describe the ‘arrangement of elements in a space’ (Roffe, 2016: 44). Including human and nonhuman elements, such as affects, signs, norms, practices, technologies and materials, all assemblages define their own territory in the unique collocation of elements they draw together. What is critically important about this formulation for our purposes is its grounding in a ‘realist ontology’ (DeLanda, 2006: 3–4). Assemblages are real features of social organisation that necessarily displace the subject and its objects in empirical analysis of this organisation (Livesey, 2010: 18–19).

Hence, the figure of the assemblage does not abandon the human subject, much less the realities of social life, but it does refuse to accept either subjects or contexts as ontological foundations for empirical inquiry. Subjects and their social interactions are not ‘given’ in experience as ontological invariants expressive of a particular set of ‘essences’ or qualities (DeLanda, 2006: 1–5). Rather, both subjects and the social lives they participate in are the product of a more fundamental set of relations, affects, events and processes. Hence the interest among philosophers of the assemblage, such as Gilles Deleuze, Manuel DeLanda and Bruno Latour, in the ontogenesis of subjects and social organisation – their coming into being. If neither subjects nor contexts are given in experience, they are nevertheless assembled, organised or ‘bundled together’ in unique arrangements of relations, forces, matter, affects, signs and spaces (see Latour, 2005: 64–69). Subjects and contexts are made in experience in and through the emergent coming together of heterogeneous materials, forces, spaces, signs and bodies. This explains why the assemblage ought to be regarded as a unique unit of analysis for empirical inquiry, rather than subjects, objects and contexts, insofar as the analysis of assemblages is intended to explain how particular contexts and/or subjectivities actually hold together in experience (see Duff, 2014: 128–132).

Like many other social science disciplines, assemblage thinking has made a significant impact on contemporary organisational studies (see Canniford and Bajde, 2016; Fuglsang and Sørensen, 2006; Murray, 2013; Thanem, 2011 for reviews). Reviewing the focus and diversity of this research, we would argue that the assemblage has been used in recent organisational research in three main ways: as a description of particular kinds of observable (social) organisational forms (Prince, 2014; Thanem, 2011; Wilkie et al., 2010), as an analytical value that provides a particular orientation to the analysis of social problems (Arsel, 2016; Linstead and Thanem, 2007; Styhre and Sundgren, 2003) and finally as a concept for thinking about the ways forces of stabilisation and transformation play out in diverse organisational settings (Duff, 2014; DeLanda, 2006; Roffe, 2016). We propose to focus on this third conceptual dimension as we think it provides the most useful orientation to empirical studies of the assemblage (see also Dewsbury, 2011; Roffe, 2016) while also helping to indicate how assemblage thinking may be developed in studies of creative work more directly.

As a concept, assemblage provides a means of analysing creativity and creative practice in ways that refuse to reify the (creative) subject of these practices. It eschews the reification of creativity either in terms of unique skills or ‘unruly’ passions manifest in certain individuals, or the enabling, ‘bohemian’ effects of particular social contexts. Instead, assemblage thinking serves to emphasise the real conditions in which creative practices emerge by way of the entire cast of human and nonhuman, distal and proximate, forces at work in such practices. This suggests that creative practices, creative identities and creative industries are socially contingent, meaning that they ought to be regarded as the outcome of relations, practices, forces and processes with discrete spatial and temporal characteristics. Accordingly, the individual incidence of creativity may be treated as an effect of heterogeneous entities (bodies, technologies, practices, relations), operating at varying spatial and temporal scales, that are each subject to processes of stabilisation (territorialisation in Deleuze’s terms) and transformation (deterritorialisation).

Underscoring this analysis is a ‘tetravalent’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 88) model of the assemblage and the forces of territorialisation and deterritorialisation by which forms and structures emerge and subside. It is worth briefly reviewing this model to properly introduce the discussion to follow regarding how assemblage thinking may inform novel empirical investigations of creative practice. This model comprises two axes (one horizontal and one vertical) that combine to describe four inter-dependent processes (or valences). The horizontal axis draws together ‘forms of content’, including ‘bodies, actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another’, with distinctive ‘forms of expression’ or ‘acts and statements’ that are attributed to corresponding forms of content (bodies and passions) in ways that moderate their ‘scope of activity’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 88). All assemblages combine bodies and statements in the creation of an intensive functional identity. An example might be an assemblage of bodies, objects and spaces in a ‘creative’ organisation or assembled in an inner-city gallery space. Each assemblage may be characterised along one axis by forms of content (bodies, human and nonhuman) and along another axis by forms of expression that are both about, and potentially enunciable by, these bodies. Each axis generates modes of individuation for the assemblage.

Assemblages are also characterised by a second, vertical axis, comprising forces of territorialisation (stability) and deterritorialisation (transformation or ‘lines of flight’). An obvious example concerns the ways assemblages draw together material resources in the deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of place (DeLanda, 2008). All assemblages create a territory, in other words. Yet the material elements that comprise territories cannot be regarded as fixed in that the material elements available for the work of territorialisation are always in motion, even if this motion is often imperceptible. Examples include not only the geological motion of tectonic plates but also the slow transformations that characterise the built environment of any urban street. Each of these assemblages combines materials in the territorialisation of place, just as this assembling is subject to countervailing forces of change and disruption. In the first instance, this involves the selection and combination of materials out of which discrete territories are composed, thereby establishing ‘functional, compact, stable structures’ (form of content) for the elements so combined (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 41). Yet this process of assembling and selection is never completed or fixed insofar as it describes a tendency towards stabilisation rather than the final achievement of this state. For DeLanda (2008), this means that all material entities, forms, spaces and territories must be regarded as ‘objectively changeable: they may undergo destabilising processes affecting their materiality, their expressivity or both’ (p. 164). This is why Deleuze and Guattari emphasise processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, in that all material forms, all assemblages, remain fluid and unstable (objectively changeable) according to the historical, political, social and economic forces applied to, or expressed through, them as they change.

Reviewing Deleuze and Guattari’s model of the assemblage, and its utility for empirical research, Dewsbury (2011) stresses its capacity to ‘fit together all the ways in which the world is now characterised by flows, connections and becomings, whose functioning logic is more about folds than structures, more complex than linear, more emergent than totalizing’ (p. 149). On the basis of this assessment, and our own reading of the assemblage thinking of Deleuze and Guattari, DeLanda and Latour, we would stress that the most useful way of approaching the tetravalent properties of the assemblage in novel studies of creativity and creative practice is to concentrate on the ways assemblages draw together social, affective and material dimensions. Assessments of a given assemblage of creativity ought to focus on how social, affective and material dimensions are made to hold together in particular instances (see Duff, 2014: 100–108). In fleshing out how this process may work in the context of novel empirical research, we now propose to develop a more extended diagram of the assemblage described by Melissa at the outset of this article.

Assemblages of creativity (a Melbourne diagram)

Before we turn to Melissa’s diagram, and the assemblage of creativity it describes, we ought to contextualise the empirical conditions from which her case is drawn. Melissa’s account emerged from a 2-hour discussion in Melbourne in mid-2015 with 15 participants, all of whom were either creative practitioners (fashion and jewellery designers, visual and performance artists) or worked closely with practitioners in the creative economy (a gallery owner and curator, a local fashion boutique owner). Participants were invited to participate in this workshop based on our personal knowledge of their creative practice and their availability to join a discussion about what enabled or frustrated their creative activity. We video recorded the session and also conducted short one-on-one video interviews with participants about what made them feel most and least creative. We are currently conducting follow-up interviews with participants to draw out themes discussed at the workshop.

The workshop discussion acted as a scoping exercise to test whether conceptualising creativity in terms of the assemblage stood up to practitioners’ experience and to refine research questions for the larger study, currently underway. As such, Melissa’s case provided an entry point for an in-depth exploration of the utility of assemblage thinking for theorising creativity, just as it provided an opportunity to propose a diagram of one individual assemblage of creativity in order to open up new lines of inquiry for the ongoing study. The diagram introduced below offers an ‘intense route to knowing’ in the sense of adopting a conceptually informed ethnography that employs ‘interventional as well as observational methods to create contexts through which to delve into questions that will reveal what matters to those people in the context of what the researcher is seeking to find out’ (Pink and Morgan, 2013: 352). Detailed discussion of the unique features of the creative milieux in which our participants worked furnished Melissa’s exemplary account. This account may be developed more fully by way of Deleuze and Guattari’s diagrammatic method.

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe the diagram as a unique ‘cartography’ that avails novel techniques for mapping the forms of content and forms of expression manifest in a given assemblage (pp. 91–92). The diagram reveals the ‘abstract machine’ which gives the assemblage its unique spatial, affective and expressive identity (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 91). The abstract machine is the ‘pure function’ whereby an assemblage ‘multiplies connections’ between heterogeneous forms, bodies, signs and affects (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 141). This function defines ‘neither substance nor form, neither content nor expression’, rather it pertains to ‘traits’ or tendencies by which the assemblage ‘establishes a connection’ between bodies, human and nonhuman, and distributes affects and relations in and through these connections (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 141). The diagram is ‘the code or arrangement by which an assemblage operates, it is a map of the function of an assemblage’ (Livesey, 2010: 18). This map documents the specific affects (capacities to act, to affect and be affected by other bodies); material effects, relations and associations; and spaces, contexts or territories a given assemblage occupies and defines. The diagram is the map of the assemblage’s functions. So what are the functions of Melissa’s assemblage?

The first thing to say of course is that this is not just Melissa’s assemblage. The assemblage described by Melissa (a pseudonym) in the workshop discussion and later elaborated upon in a series of follow-up conversations should be understood to describe a particular event of subjectivation in which Melissa is individuated as a particular kind of creative subject. This is not to say that nothing of ‘Melissa’ enters into this event – the logic of subjectivation describes forces of duration and change, of the subject’s staying the same and its transformations in events (Duff, 2014: 177) – it is rather to draw attention to the affects and relations whereby Melissa is subjectivated, made subject, in this specific assemblage of forces. The force of this subjectivation is the key to understanding how assemblages generate particular kinds of creative practice and particular kinds of creative subjects (Wilkie et al., 2010).

Without employing the language of subjectivation, Melissa spoke often of personal ‘jolts’ or transformations in her creative practice, as this practice had evolved according to her travels and varied collaborations. Melissa described herself as a ‘performance and visual artist’ in her ‘mid thirties’. While she is from Australia, she has also worked in Europe and North America and her brother, as we will explain, now works in New York. Melissa described her practice as ‘socially engaged’ and ‘inter-disciplinary’ in scope. It is concerned with how people relate to each other and with finding ways to communicate across difference and diversity. Her past projects have sought to prompt new forms of cooperation by rewriting conventional forms of interaction, alongside engaged community partners. Melissa emphasised how her practice seeks to forge and maintain ethical interactions and collaborative ‘social explorations’.

These, then, are the subjective lines of individuation that frame the diagram of Melissa’s creative practice introduced at the outset of this article. Yet this diagram also has diverse material elements, including most obviously the studio space that served as an important social and material infrastructure for Melissa’s practice. In describing this space, Melissa alluded to a desire for community, for social connection, as an important determinant of her choice of this particular studio space, and her subsequent disappointment when ‘largely because of the architecture of the studios no community formed, despite everyone’s best efforts’. We have already noted how all assemblages define a territory, and Melissa’s comments here provide some indication of the specific modes of territorialisation at work in this particular assemblage. The desire for connection, both to other (creative) people and to ‘ideas and materials or techniques’, is already figured into Melissa’s account of the ‘pleasure of creating’. Indeed, developing community is a focus of Melissa’s practice, as she described it during the workshop, and remains an important part of how she identifies herself as an ‘artist’. In this respect, Melissa has already characterised creativity as a form of assembling people, materials, ideas and practice ‘before, during and [after]’ any instance of creative work.

We might reasonably infer, on this basis, that the community Melissa expressed an interest in discovering in this particular space was desirable precisely to the extent that it may avail novel opportunities for new associations between people, ideas, materials and practices. This inference was borne out in a subsequent interview when Melissa spoke more favourably about her current studio arrangements in exactly these terms and the opportunities for novelty that it allowed. In the first instance, however, the very materiality of space, its particular architecture, mitigated against this kind of novelty, leading to Melissa’s attempts to find ‘another room in the studio’ that addressed the affective, social and material deficits of her ‘actual’ studio. Melissa subsequently described the architecture of the studio in terms of its built environment, linking this to the activity it engendered and hinting at the atmosphere of urgency and disconnection that she associated with it:

[It was a] series of adjacent boxes really, with no windows and no natural light, with a long corridor running along the whole space so you really only saw people as they were coming and going, like eager to get out or eager to get back to work, so no one really talked or just hung out.

The material and affective organisation of this space, the territory of the assemblage, is very clearly attributed with a distinctive form of agency in Melissa’s characterisations of her studio space. This agency effectively limited social and material relations, and ongoing informal creative associations, by foreclosing opportunities for spontaneous interactions, ‘just talking’ or ‘hanging out’. The space acted in such a way as to limit the assemblage’s creative output by reducing opportunities for creative subjects to ‘consult’ one another on their ‘creative practice’ over time. As a result, Melissa went searching for another form of creative community, and the creative or consultative input it might provide, by connecting with her brother in New York City via Skype. Skype provided an appealing mode of affective connection by availing a free and seemingly limitless means of maintaining ‘a sense of community’, of discussion, consultation, support and friendship. If assemblages serve in large measure to regulate the circulation of affects, materials, signs and practices within a given territory (Roffe, 2016: 45–49), then one must acknowledge the distributive role of the ‘Skype window’ open on Melissa’s laptop in accelerating the circulation of these signs and affects in this particular creative assemblage, in this particular space or territory.

Like a ‘portal that was opened onto the other side of the world for us’, the Skype/laptop/family/dialogue/support assemblage availed the means by which creativity might be expressed and supported as a particular function of affects, practices, signs, materials and relations each converging in an event of creativity in (virtual) space. Melissa described how her creative practice was mediated by her brother’s advice, support, criticism and reflections. Yet this mediation was itself only possible via a Skype window open on a laptop, connected to reliable and fast broadband Internet access, with all the intervening technical, social, economic and political infrastructures necessary to maintain this connection. Melissa found community with her brother in this connection, who collaborated with her on a series of creative practices, mediated from afar via a convenient encounter with information technology.

Assemblage thinking requires us not only to acknowledge the mediating force of this technology but also to be wary of rendering it into the service of human subjects, as if it is merely a passive tool in the hands of its human agents. Skype is the subject of this creative practice, for it is the indispensible agent of this particular collaboration. Without Skype and the hardware to operate it, no connection is possible. Without Skype, Melissa and her brother are left working on other sides of the planet without association, without consultation, without support. Describing the effect of this collaboration as ‘another room in the studio that I never went into, and vice versa for him’, Skype provided both a form of content and a form of expression in and for the assemblage of creativity that it partially constituted and partially mediated. Yet we must, of course, acknowledge that this ‘other room’ had other affordances too. Although she did not describe it as such, the Skype connection that enabled contact with her brother and the resultant opening out of new, virtual, space in her studio might also have limited her contact with other, more proximate elements. Thus, Skype exercised a peculiar agency of both enabling and potentially limiting the form and elements of Melissa’s creative assemblage.

This point highlights the value of more carefully documenting the diagram of Melissa’s assemblage by way of the ‘tetravalent’ logic proposed by Deleuze and Guattari (1987), and briefly reviewed above. The first (horizontal) axis combines forms of content with forms of expression. In Melissa’s assemblage, we might observe all manner of bodies, actions and passions encountering one another, including walls and corridors interacting with one another in the production of an unwelcome privacy, a space of remoteness. The corridor, doors, walls and enclosed spaces act in this assemblage by way of their capacity to affect the bodies both human and nonhuman whose encounters they mediate in space. Melissa interacts with numerous other human and nonhuman bodies in this assemblage, including books, documents, art supplies and materials, benches, chairs and furniture, and occasionally other people, but most salient for our purposes is the electricity/hardware/software body that acts by affecting a means of connection between Melissa and her brother. This body directly mediates the specific forms of expression, ‘acts and statements’, that (human) bodies are capable of articulating in this assemblage. The open Skype window is a form of content mediating a form of expression as it regulates the acts and statements Melissa and her brother are capable of enacting. It is for this reason that Deleuze and Guattari (1987) stress that this first axis affects each assembled body’s distinctive ‘scope of activity’. As such, the assemblage may be defined by distinctive forces of individuation as they affect each assembled body. Examples include Melissa’s subject-becoming-artist as she works in the space. the laptop-becoming-mediator as it facilitates creative relations and associations in an assemblage. and the walls and doors-becoming-territorialised as they affect an atmosphere of remoteness. All give partial expression to an assemblage of creativity.

This assemblage may also be characterised along a second axis comprising forces of territorialisation (stability) and deterritorialisation (change). We have already noted the extent to which the architecture of this space served to enclose and stabilise a particular territory, one of privacy if not sequestration. Yet this territorialisation may also be said to have availed a very specific ‘affective atmosphere’ (Anderson, 2009), evident in the isolation and frustration Melissa felt in this space, but also in the distinctive capacities for acting that this atmosphere engendered. In the very materiality of the space, Melissa encountered an atmosphere of isolation that invited her to act, to seek novel sources of companionship, comfort and advice, which she found in lengthy Skype conversations with her brother. In turn, the Skype connection transformed Melissa’s creative practice, her capacity for creativity, according to the particular social, affective and material forces it generated and transmitted. These included the social and affective forces of inspiration, support, collaboration, frustration, support and solace. Acting with her brother, connected via Skype, Melissa entered into an assemblage of creativity that distributed novel creative capacities in the unique encounters it sustained.

These forces served to stabilise the material, social and affective character of this assemblage of creativity, even though these forces never achieved a perfect stasis, a perpetual staying the same, as they were continually subjected to countervailing forces of deterritorialisation, ‘lines of flight’ which forever threatened to carry the assemblage away. The first such line of flight may be observed in Melissa’s longing for interaction in this space. Every moment of frustrated interaction, of irritation at people’s ‘coming and going’ without lingering, without affecting the community of collaboration the shared space seemed to warrant, opened up a line of flight that carried affects, signs, practices and materials into another assemblage, the one Melissa established in her electricity/brother/laptop/Skype/Internet/talk assemblage. These lines of flight destabilised the assemblage, disrupting the abstract machine that gave it its function, and a means of establishing connections between heterogeneous bodies, until finally the assemblage collapsed as Melissa departed for another studio along with myriad affective, material and social bodies, signs, objects, practices and forces. These forces of stabilisation and destabilisation were held in tension until the assemblage formally dissolved.

Forces are always transmitted between assemblages (Dewsbury, 2011). In Melissa’s case, social and affective forces were taken up anew in the next assemblage of creativity that characterised (or enabled) her creative practice. Partially motivated by her frustrations at the lack of face-to-face connections in her former studio, and partially inspired by the experience of many of her friends and peers, including her brother, Melissa moved houses to a space which could support a home studio. Melissa added that

I have always lived in really ‘open door’ houses where people are constantly coming and going, people sleeping on the couch visiting from interstate or overseas, people coming in for a meal or to talk about their work, so it seemed really natural just to set up my studio at home.

Yet she also acknowledged that this particular studio move was only made possible with the sudden availability of rental accommodation which could materially support a home studio, along with the social networks which gave Melissa first access to this house following a favourable recommendation from the former tenant, a close friend of Melissa’s, to the real estate agent who managed the property. As Melissa stated,

this place really fell into my lap after [friend] decided to move to Berlin and she said that the landlord was really ‘artist friendly’ and I would love it so she put in a good word for me with the agent and it all took off from there.

According to these social, affective and material connections, Melissa came to participate in another assemblage of creativity, which availed many of the creative forces that were absent in her former space. These diverse social, affective and material forces facilitated, expressed and sustained a different cast of creative practices within another distinctive assemblage of creativity.

Conclusion: the human and nonhuman labour of creative practice

The diagram of Melissa’s creative practice that we have just described and the assemblage thinking that this diagram relies on help to reveal the full cast of human and nonhuman bodies and forces that are actually involved in the everyday practice of creativity. For too long human subjects have been unreasonably foregrounded in studies of creative practice. They have been treated as agents of innovation, disruption and change, ushering in a more appealing future by virtue of their creative vision (Cropley, 2006; Flew, 2011). This attitude sets creative people apart from other subjects and groups, even though the actual mechanisms of this distinctiveness have never been reliably determined. For is creativity an innate talent, an inalienable quality, some neurocognitive birthright, or is it, more prosaically, a function of discipline, extended practice and a supportive social and economic environment (see Howkins, 2011)? As Deleuze (2003) would have it, we must always start in the middle with the conjunctive ‘and’ rather than the eliminative ‘either/or’.

As such, assemblage thinking suggests that creativity may be characterised in terms of a capacity to link ideas, practices, innovations, materials and techniques in the generation of novelty, provided one accepts that this capacity is widely distributed among both human and nonhuman agents. This is the lesson of our analysis of Melissa’s creative practice, yet it holds for more celebrated instances of innovation too. Bob Dylan is said to have revolutionised popular music at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965, although many have compellingly attributed this revolution to the force of electricity and volume as much as Dylan’s elliptical phrasing (Heylin, 2003). Marcel Duchamp is widely regarded as having invented conceptual art in 1917 with the exhibition of one of his ‘readymades’, although much of the force of this invention must be attributed to the porcelain of the ‘Fountain’ itself and the social and material contexts of its exhibition and reception (Tomkins, 1996). In making these observations, we do not deny that some individuals exhibit greater capacities for creativity than others and that certain individuals occasionally become capable of unprecedented innovations that may well deserve the attribution of genius. Even so, recognition of these innovations ought to include the full cast of human and nonhuman agents involved.

This proposition has enormous implications for how the creative labour that lies at the heart of creative practice is characterised and assessed. Much of this labour is conducted, mediated or facilitated by nonhuman agents functioning as active collaborators in the work of creativity. It is often remarked how information and communication technologies, for example, are transforming creative production by facilitating the flow of ideas, techniques, practices and concepts within and between diverse communities of practice (see Bilton and Cummings, 2014; Howkins, 2011). These technologies were central to the creative force of Melissa’s assemblage and the creative practices this assemblage was able to generate. Yet typically, these technologies are treated as passive objects or tools of creative practice, as if they merely accelerate flows that ordinarily would have connected ideas, people, techniques and practices anyway, albeit more slowly and less reliably. By treating these technologies as intermediaries in Latour’s (2005) conceptual vocabulary, the force of human creativity is foregrounded, while the nonhuman agency of a vast hinterland of technical and material objects and connections is ‘black-boxed’, further reinforcing the anthropocentrism of creative practice.

Our efforts to open up discussions of creative practice to include more of the nonhuman mediators that are actively involved in the work of creative labour yields a more accurate account of the diverse labour (and labourers) involved in creative work, but it should also transform how creative work is understood, sustained and promoted. Policies to promote creativity too easily fall into the trap of seeking to attract and retain creative people within a particular region, field or industry (see Florida, 2002), without considering the nonhuman infrastructures that sustain creative work in practice. Perhaps more could be done for a city or a nation’s creative output by providing universal access to fast and affordable Internet access, by giving all students in all schools musical instruments and free tuition in their use or by allowing employees in diverse employment settings to bring their pets into work, than by transforming human resource management, employment conditions and hiring policies to ‘attract’ creative staff to a particular region or industry.

In this sense at least, one of the most interesting ways of diversifying creative work today may well lie in opening this labour up to more of its nonhuman collaborators – the nonhuman agents, bodies and forces that enable and sustain the human subject’s becoming creative. Consistent with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) account of the assemblage, and our adoption of this logic in our analysis of Melissa’s assemblage, creativity ought to be understood as an emergent property of the social, affective and material conjoining of heterogeneous forces, in which the force of creativity cannot be reliably traced back to any one body within this assemblage. No one force in Melissa’s assemblage may be said to guarantee its creative output; rather all these forces combine in their own unique permutations to make this particular collocation of human and nonhuman forces capable of expressing creativity. DeLanda (2006) stresses that the idea of emergent properties distinguishes the assemblage from other attempts to transcend the subject/object binary that has long sustained social science inquiry, along with its human/nonhuman and agent/structure analogues. In emphasising the role of emergent properties, assemblage thinking calls attention to the actual conditions whereby a process like creativity is generated in connections or alliances between human and nonhuman agents (see also Prince, 2014).

For this reason, creativity must be understood as an emergent property of Melissa’s assemblage. It was engendered in this particular assemblage in the conjunction of spaces, affects, materials, documents, hardware and software, electricity, time and practice. Creativity may not be traced to any one of these bodies; rather it must be sought in encounters between these forces. This conclusion disrupts existing accounts of creative practice by refusing to reify the human subject of this practice, yet it may well open up new ‘matters of concern’ (Latour, 2005: 87) by asking new questions about access to nonhuman collaborators in the work of creative labour. To date, most interest in questions of diversity in the cultural and creative industries has focused on familiar axes of social and political differentiation such as (human) sex, gender, age, race, class and sexuality. As Latour (2005) would have it, these questions relegate the entire universe of nonhuman actors – the missing masses of social life – to mute indifference. Inquiring after the status and capacities of the human subject of creativity does not exhaust the array of matters of concern that pertain to creative work. Caring for the nonhuman ecologies of creative practice may in this respect at least avail an especially fruitful way of protecting and extending the diversity of creative work.