Abstract
This article develops a neo-Bourdieusian analysis of how creative workers respond to the pressures of freelance, contract and project-based cultural production. Using data from 15 in-depth interviews with independent ‘creatives’ we enrol Bourdieu's fields and Clifford Geertz's account of involution – internal over-elaboration – to investigate the tendencies, nuances and outcomes of creative labour's production practices. To answer the field's piecemeal funding and limited market rewards three broad strategic involution strategies are outlined: ‘hard driving’ of resources; reworking and hybridization of existing cultural forms; and uncodified intricacy within the social relations of production. This theorization illustrates how iterative internal complexity aids the economizing of cultural production oriented to gaining recognition while, due to the social intricacy of creative processes, inducing a tendency towards emotional and physical fatigue. Rather than promote a meritocratic productivity imagined by policy discourses, involuted labour produces burnout and thus contributes to the churn of creative talent.
Keywords
Introduction
Regardless of cultural and creative sector activity, small-scale independent cultural production is often undertaken in a range of similar conditions. For emerging independent creative workers this involves intensive development of new cultural goods and productions: a show; an event; a collection; a recording; and a physical or digital commodity. Although it is doxic to label such undertakings as ‘entrepreneurial’ (acting as a risk taker, innovator, decision-maker, arbitrageur and coordinator) it is also recognized that this entrepreneurial action, sans economic capital, involves novel responses to structural constraints (Scott, 2012a, 2017). Recent critical research has sought to provide a fuller description of this creative labour as ‘wage less’ work (Alacovska, 2022), occurring among a cohort of ‘projectariat’ who function in the liminal space between state grants, market returns and gift economies (Banks & Hesmondhalgh, 2009; Greer et al., 2019; Shorthose & Strange, 2004; Umney & Symon, 2020). To navigate these contexts, Alacovska (2022, p. 687) highlights the role of ‘commoning,’ a gentle form of mutual help and gift exchange within creative communities that co-constitute the creative sector. Even though commoning evinces a sense of shared care to enable creativity, there remain significant pressures on the projectariat. They are compelled to manage the presentation of self in person and online, undertake network generation/maintenance, hold multiple jobs, find funding sources through government, philanthropic and/or private partners, negotiate gifts and in-kind support – and while they are at it – make a profit (or at least cover costs).
Considering these conditions, this article aims to add further theoretical nuance to the ongoing scholarly interest in artistic and creative labour by investigating how small scale, independent, artistic workers adapt to contemporary fields of cultural production and consider the consequences. We draw on qualitative interviews with South Australian visual artists, fashion designers, dramaturgs, dancers, musicians, game developers and jewellers to illustrate how the creative industries induce involuted labour processes leading to emotional exhaustion and a diminished sense of efficacy. This analysis develops through a dialogue between Bourdieu's durable concept of field and anthropologist Clifford Geertz's (1963) theorization of involution: the creation of internal complexity to aid socio-cultural processes. We follow Swedberg's (2017) approach to theorizing by creating an analogy, using Geertz's historical account of post-colonial agriculture as a novel entry point through which to comprehend contemporary – involuted – cultural production, the projectariat and artistic work. In contrast to the often optimistic and communitarian descriptions of ‘commoning,’ we consider how involuted production practices provoke exhaustion or burnout.
The article develops as follows. First, the concepts of fields and involution are reviewed. Then the qualitative data collection and illustrative methods are described. The substantive sections follow where respondents’ voices explain the dimensions of involuted labour in contemporary creative fields. Here we foreground their pragmatic response to field pressures and find three key involution tendencies: (a) ‘hard driving’ projects to maintain a field presence; (b) an additive variation or ‘hair-splitting’ of existing cultural forms to create a surface uniqueness rather than innovation; and (c) the inclusion of additional creative labour within projects through intricate and uncodified social relations. Following this illustration, the final section considers the wider cultural and policy implications of involution for the wellbeing of creative labour.
Fields and involution
Bourdieusian sociology evolves from an empirically grounded and relational conceptual architecture (Bourdieu, 1984; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). Following Wacquant (2018) we focus on how creative fields structure the projectariats’ production strategies ‘from a distance,’ touching upon relevant Bourdieusian concepts where relevant. Fields delineate specific domains of social interest and action understood as spaces of contest and competition between actors. Examples of fields include the media, the state, law, the academe and science. Fields of cultural production have their own sub-fields, conventions and modes of recognition, depending on the art form: theatre; popular music; visual arts; dance; literature; fashion; and so on. As a meso-scale concept, fields highlight how social actors deploy resources (social, cultural, symbolic and economic capital) and dispositions (the physically and cognitively embodied social structures of an actor's habitus acquired through their experience of the historically variegated social space; see Bourdieu, 1984) in the pursuit of field-specific rewards including social recognition, esteem, honour, money and prizes. Fields are also risky and disenchanting domains (Atkinson, 2022). To enter, social actors possess an illusio or investment in the stakes in the field, requiring a willingness to suspend the risks – that is, ‘artists make no money’ – to seek material and symbolic rewards.
Fields are relatively autonomous having developed their own logics that cannot be reduced solely to state imperatives or market demands. Notably, all fields of cultural production have diverse systems of valuation: artistic and aesthetic merit; truth and justice; and what can be considered correct and worthy (Bourdieu, 1993). Hence, fields are sites of the struggle for legitimate valuation and the definition of rewards. Such tensions create a topological space where actors are relationally positioned to each other through their orientations, strategies, composites of capitals and their current state of recognition, such as critical acclaim or reputation (see Wacquant, 2018). Bourdieu (1993) famously models the key tensions within fields of cultural production through oppositional poles, which act like magnetic forces attracting or repelling participants. The major division is between the heteronomous principle of the market (blockbusters, the bourgeoisie novel and popular musicals) and autonomous ‘art for arts’ sake’ (avant-garde aesthetics where ‘the loser wins’ through long-term consecration). Social actors can, however, undertake a trajectory between and through poles as taste cultures change, such as the underground musician who breaks into the mainstream (Hesmondhalgh, 2006). This polarization remains significant for understanding creative labour. Tensions between symbolic and economic gain in contemporary creative fields prompts ongoing struggles to acquire the autonomous sources of recognition (awards, critical acclaim, recognition and influence), which are set in friction with heteronomous principles of generating income from art: market success; patronage offered by state funders and arts grants; and philanthropic prizes and awards (Herd, 2013; Wacquant, 2018, p. 384). Notwithstanding these struggles, creative fields remain the key site in the formation of social status and symbolic prestige for creative labour (Brook, 2013).
Although fields are somewhat self-directed domains, neo-Bourdieusians understand that action in one field is embedded in other fields. Fields of cultural production are nested in fields of politics (debates over cultural policy and funding) and class relations (or the labour market and state transfers) (Bourdieu, 1993). Therefore, the position of social actors in their primary orientating field (such as theatre or visual arts) is bisected, textured and orientated by their position in other fields. This nested structure means emerging independent creative workers have an awareness of how capacities and struggles in one field (the labour market, housing fields and the bureaucratic field of arts funding) impinges on stakes and rewards of another field. Therefore, strategizing between fields creates a ‘social surface’ of how possibilities in one field shapes possibilities in another (Atkinson, 2022). Concrete examples of the nested nature of fields impacting cultural production are the neo-liberalization of labour markets and arts funding. Labour is increasingly exposed to commodification, tightened welfare conditionalities and intersects with casualization and the growing service sector (Fraser, 2014; Scott, 2012b). As emerging creative workers often hold multiple jobs to enter their primary field, these conditions are reflected in incomes. Outside the full-time professional areas of advertising, design, gaming and administration, creatives tend to work more and earn less (McCutcheon & Cunningham, 2021). Further bisecting these material conditions is growing wealth inequality, rental inflation, and cost of living pressures, as asset-rich Australian households drive wealth disparities (Adkins et al., 2021). Despite these material conditions, the creative sector is frequently presented in bureaucratic fields as growing industrial sectors, notably through the Federal government's recent Creative Australia policy suite (Creative Australia, 2023).
How do these field structures, and intersecting macro-fields, condition on the ground practices of cultural production? Here we articulate Bourdieu's fields with Geertz's concept of involution, or internal complexity within labour and cultural processes, to understand the nuances of ‘creatives’ production practices. Geertz's (1963) Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia is puzzled by the barriers to Rostovian modernization in Indonesia (Rostow, 1959). To explore this question, his entry point is sawah (rice terrace) agriculture, its labour processes and village systems of ownership and management. For Geertz, the sawah is an incredibly robust eco-system being able to sustain ‘intense population pressure’ without a breakdown on the ‘physical side’ (Geertz, 1963, p. 33). This resilience allows an ever-increasing number of people to be supported ‘within an undamaged habitat’ (Geertz, 1963, p. 33). Such labour intensity means ‘the output of most terraces can almost be indefinitely increased by more careful, fine-comb cultivation techniques; it seems almost always possible somehow to squeeze just a little more out of a mediocre sawah by working it just a little bit harder,’ that is, through involution (Geertz, 1963, p. 34). Rather than the formation of a class society, this cash-subsistence economy produced ‘a comparatively high degree of social and economic homogeneity by dividing [or though social relations, involuting] the economic pie into a steadily increasing number of minute pieces … characterized by the “just enoughs” and “not quite enoughs”’ (Geertz, 1963, p. 97). The sawah's flexibility also assisted the emergence of ‘a dense web of finely spun work rights and work responsibilities’ (Geertz, 1963, p. 99), complex social ties with each one unique to the circumstance so that ‘it is this flexibility within fixity which has given its peculiar usefulness as an involutional mechanism’ (authors’ emphasis; Geertz, 1963, p. 98).
Culture too is impacted by involuted agricultural practices as new refined patterns of language, etiquette, dance and ceremonial behaviour arise. Geertz suggests that ‘involution…. [sees] the basic forms of art have reached finality, the structural features are fixed beyond variation, inventive originality is exhausted’ (Geertz, 1963, p. 81). With ‘expansive creativeness having dried up at the source, a special kind of [involuted] virtuosity takes its place, a sort of technical hair-splitting’ suggesting ‘the inevitable result is progressive complication, a variety within uniformity, virtuosity within monotony. This is involution’ (Geertz, 1963, p. 81). These observations lead Geertz to note three generalizable features of involution: ‘1/increasing tenacity of a basic pattern 2/internal elaboration and ornateness, 3/technical hair-splitting, and unending virtuosity’ (Geertz, 1963, p. 82).
Contemporary creative fields evince striking parallels to the involution processes identified by Geertz. Although there are categorical differences between tropical agriculture and post-modern dance or visual arts, there are notable homologies such as the shared poverty of emerging creatives, their movement between multiple jobs (subsistence and creative production), and the demands of bureaucracies in terms of grant applications and reporting. Similarly, involution via commoning to produce cost-effective art draws on complex social relationships to include more creative labour in a project or through the fine-grained trimming of creatives to mitigate financial limitations. Furthermore, there is the involution of cultural forms that re-makes, assembles, remixes and blends symbolic texts, idioms, styles and genres, and which remain a key art world feature identified by cultural theorists (Fisher, 2022; Jameson, 2016). Or, in Geertz's terms, a type of cultural ‘hair-splitting’ to create new forms within established conventions. These practices are illustrated more fully by our respondents.
Method
To develop an understanding of involuted labour in creative fields we draw on qualitative empirical material and adopt the illustrative method. Respondents were sourced through snowballing sampling, with initial respondents identified through conversations with arts sector funding agencies. Institutional ethics committee approval was secured (Flinders University HEL 2531) and 15 qualitative one-on-one interviews were conducted with emerging independent creative workers in Adelaide, South Australia. We sampled for breadth and interviewed those engaged in contemporary dance, popular music, fashion, jewellery, visual arts and game production. Of these, 10 participants identified as female, two lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning (one’s sexual or gender identity) and intersex, three males and two were Black, indigenous and people of colour. We thank our participants for taking the time to be interviewed and for their generous sharing of insights into creative life. Interviews occurred during November 2021 and January 2022 and were between 45 and 90 min in length. These were recorded and then transcribed verbatim. These interview data were coded iteratively. After an initial selective coding where the core tendencies of involution were sought in the responses, the relationships between responses and theory were aligned and indicative examples were selected. Two subsequent axial coding iterations were conducted (Strauss, 1987), with each review attentive to any illustrative discussion of the three broad dimensions of involution. The interview material presented below has been lightly edited for meaning.
The illustrative method was used to analyse the interview material. This is where ‘a researcher applies a theory to a concrete historical situation or social setting or organizes data on the basis of prior theory’ (Neuman, 1991, p. 421). Historical sociology established the illustrative approach, which tends to produce middle-range theories. Here the ‘empty box’ of theory allows argument to develop by analogy. In doing so, the main type of comparative technique is between ‘equivalent units on one hand and a theory or concept on the other’ (Bonnell, 1980, p. 165). For the analytical purposes below, this method interprets how the units of cultural workers, and their production practices, can be compared to the pre-established theories of involution and field dynamics.
Involution tendency 1: ‘Hard driving’ cultural production
Creative fields elicit an illusio or ‘passionate’ investment by actors who enter them (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; McRobbie, 2018; Threadgold, 2023). This investment is manifest in a willingness to suspend material and emotional risks, and to self-manage the creative process through intensive periods of production. In doing so, the first involution is induced: a mode of internal complexity and hyper-concentration of the basic pattern, or what Geertz (1963) refers to as ‘hard driving’ production via intricacy and intensity. In creative fields, there is also a pragmatic inventiveness to such intensiveness. Our respondents reflexively respond to the opportunities of their respective fields by developing strategies to work the outputs of their creative practice a little harder; iteratively waxing and waning on the forms and modes of production in ways oriented to maintaining their work's symbolic salience within the field, all the while positioning for future projects and imagined trajectories. A painter observes how the careful curation (or hard driving) of a portfolio builds into future opportunities: I have a lot in storage, and I do try to pull some out for new exhibitions. That's something I’ve been trying to kind of learn…each exhibition for me is almost like a separate project and I want to work on new ideas with each project. But as a result, it can feel kind of like I’ve done that project, these paintings are in the past, [now] I’m trying to be a little bit more open minded and starting to try to reuse those paintings for future exhibitions. Because I’m acting in it and I wrote it and I kind of direct it, I couldn’t produce as well; it would be too much to be producing in the morning and then performing in the evening, that's my limit … there are shows that have funding and I’m cool I am getting paid for these, and then there are shows where I’m cool – just accepting that I’m not going to get paid for that one … and you’re already paying yourself such a low wage (Actor/dramaturg). It sucks a lot of energy. The Fringe was so stressful, yes it was our most financially successful thing, but [collaborator] and I were both just working the equivalent of four people's jobs, and with the problem with the rehearsal space [access issues], and our venue was not very nice to us, and all of these legal things that we didn’t know about, because that's something they definitely don’t [teach] – like risk assessments, like testing and tagging…and also performing it, and also directing it, and also choreographing, and being in it, and out of it … it was just a lot. (Dancer) Logistically it just appears intimidating and difficult. There's no institution that teaches the skillset required to work in construction sites; there's traffic management, lift licenses, insurances, contracts. You’re working with large companies, commercial businesses, sometimes councils. There's a lot to learn in the world that surrounds the making, let alone then actually translating my work to a large scale. I book everything, I’m in charge of everything. I am the project manager, as well as the artist, as well as public liaison, as well as everything else. (Visual artist) Being our own factory we have a lot more control over the waste streams that come out of the manufacturing process. We catalogue and sort every bit of waste that comes out of that process, whether that's in the cutting or in the sewing processes or sampling process, and we are constantly putting them into different categories. We will determine whether the scraps are able to be used in another garment or an engineered replacement pattern. If they’re a bit too small for that, they might end up being like little components – like a collar or something small. Finally, when waste becomes too small to utilize, that's when it would go into our recycling program. And that's where we are collecting and sorting colour, fibre, so that we can rag it and turn it into a new yarn basically to go back into a new garment.
Involution tendency 2: ‘Hair-splitting’ as variation of existing cultural forms
Involution's second modality demands similar processes of internal elaboration but does so by working on the plasticity of art forms. That is, how ‘symbolic texts’ and genres allow adaptation through the addition and modification of adjacent forms and styles, or through the authorial reinterpretation of meaning within the form (Hesmondhalgh, 2019). A key tendency in this involution modality is ‘hair-splitting’ the cultural form; the ornate re-shaping, adding to, or embellishing, while remaining recognizable within shared disciplinary or canonical conventions (Becker, 2008). This approach allows existing symbolic texts with wider cultural recognition to be re-used or adapted to emerging market niches. For example, one strategy was to print reproductions in another medium that, like the bourgeoisie art revolution of Belle Époque Paris (Hall, 1999), would convert public art to private art via accessible re-packaging. … there's an accessibility issue with fine arts. I want everyone to be able to have art and I’m not someone that could afford a $4,000 painting for my house. Making my paintings as prints under $100 means people more like myself can have this thing in their home. I’ll do a limited line; the buyer still has something that's unique and valuable. I don’t make a huge profit off those, but I enjoy being able to provide. (Muralist/visual artist) Anyone who's at early stage in their career must work really hard to build a name to secure projects or opportunities … I get a bit bored {but} might spend three or four years just doing paintings about cats and each exhibition will show off the newest iterations of cat paintings. (Visual artist) In my experience of creating VR [virtual reality] works that you can on-sell, [being] bought to use for two weeks, and then it comes back to me. I don’t have to rehearse [the] dance, I don’t have any costs in sending that to them … it's quite exciting because you know ultimately this can be shown in a gallery in Singapore or Japan, with instructions, like how to set it up, and it can still be performative. I try to use the platform to encourage the participant or the user to move, to empathize with the dance. (Choreographer/dancer) It's based on a famous play and is supposed to be the best role that a female actor can play. It's supposed to be like Hamlet for women. We’re doing the play but between each scene we’ve got three actresses, and they compete against each other to see who will get to play the lead role in the next scene … they have competitions, there's strength tests and stuff like that. It's not acting, it's a real competition between real actors and so we all must know all the parts … whoever wins the competition gets to play the lead role. (Actor/dramaturg). My jewellery is a modern take on taxidermy jewellery; it's all about recycling animals that have died of unpreventable deaths. People donate things like their pets, I have vets donate, I get a lot of roadkill. My pieces are wearable art in a way. I want to try to mix both skills that I have learnt, taxidermy and say silver smithing and then doing installation work.
Involution tendency 3: Intricate and uncodified social relations
Creative fields depend on social capital, relations of trust (networks), gifts and extended reputational arrangements. Involution is constitutive of these collaborative networks, taking numerous contingent forms, and can be understood as a method of work splitting to manage risk. At times this requires that creatives carry the financial and economic costs of production while negotiating with other organizational temporalities that haunt creativity: be these state funders, private investors, or in-kind gifts. Therefore, it is commonplace to stitch together external funding and personal savings to get creative projects ‘off the ground.’ But within these parameters, the financial costs are often distributed across social networks – micro-adjustments to budgets to offer a role to a colleague, supportive guest appearances at discount rates – all sustained by a coincidence of interests in the field. This blending of funding and social capital casts involution within a complex web of uncodified current and future interdependencies before anything is performed. This requires virtuoso self-management skills: … like [a] theatre (1) in Melbourne, they get government funding, and they don’t charge venue fees to artists. They select some works and then once your work is selected, they take 20% ticket sales. But (theatre 2) also get government funding to give us a small budget; I think for (play A) and the (play B) we get $5,000 from them and then you use that to leverage for other grants. And then from that someone in Melbourne at theatre (3) saw (play A) and I’d already entered it into a playwriting competition at (3) and they’ve really liked it and so they asked to come over to Melbourne and do the show. And (theatre 3), kind of like (theatre 1), didn’t charge us up front fees, they just took 50% of ticket sales and that sold well too. And I guess the show at (theatre 3) we did without any grant money, we just used the money that we had made from Adelaide Fringe to do it at (theatre 3), which also made money and now we’re taking it to Sydney Fringe. (Dramaturg) The gift of the space for a year was a great idea, hasn’t panned out in reality quite as well as we’d hoped because it's the ballroom space, they hire it out for weddings a lot, they hire it out for business meetings and stuff, and they also don’t like us to keep anything in there at all – it's not very conducive to efficient artmaking. (Dancer) You get asked to work for free, or you get asked to work for half the money; like next week I’m not being paid properly. There aren’t many jobs, and because you want to do it, you enjoy doing it, you go, ‘okay yeah,’ I will do two weeks for $700, but you know, I should be being paid a lot more than that … I do enjoy working with this person. [But] there's so much exploitation and there's so much stuff like that where like, suddenly you’ve got $200 less than you originally agreed to, like two weeks before you’re about to start and you’re like, oh yeah, I guess I’ll still do it because I still want to, but you’re being pushed all the time. (Dancer) We’ve always been very big on, as much as possible, paying ourselves and paying our artists because that so often doesn’t happen. What we did with the Fringe [show] in terms of structure and payment last year was we got grant funding from a whole bunch of different places, little bits of money … and [other creatives] generally enjoy working with us. We like to work efficiently and intelligently with kind of the resources that we have, and that includes money, and that includes people … we’ve definitely had some more generous with their time or their skills in terms of making props or costumes and stuff like that, or transporting stuff or storing it … I have asked everyone to track their timing; I really hope that they are, but we will probably end up working it out on more of an annual ‘this is what you should get paid’ [basis]. (Dancer) All the risk is up-front. [Business Partner] is putting in a little bit of money to pay for the desk, so we have a shared office space and that's a reasonable price. I have paid for the business administration … we are currently accruing debt, we are not paying any of the staff, everyone is just sort of chipping in bits as it needs to get done. Our lead programmer has just quit his job at KFC because he is earning enough from the Minecraft server that he runs as a passive income. People work on their own machine; nobody bothers me about the power bill. All the sort of overheads that would usually go into this stuff, software licenses etc., they are covered by the individuals. (Game developer) If it starts to earn money, everyone starts to share in that money coming in, when we do the final compensation rounds, we have to work all that out and tie it all up. It's all just sum cost until the product is on the market but when we get investors in there's always like a margin on it. I will automatically add a 20% margin at the end of it to studio costs which partly goes to maybe things that I have forgotten to include. It all comes down to negotiating … it's all a bit flexible and flimsy. (Game developer)
‘Burnout:’ Involution in creative fields
What is striking from these accounts is creatives’ inventiveness and illusio in assembling new cultural experiences. Involution is an adaptive strategy for stretching personal, material and ideational resources in response to external, structural conditions across creative fields. In our interview data, respondents acknowledged their willingness to play the game; most had received (multiple) grants to support their practice, development and travel, participated in markets through sales, exhibitions, performances and streaming, and often recounted the benefits of mentoring programmes. They responded to the demands of the field echoing a doxic framing of how the creative field functions (Wacquant, 2018), foregrounding a Becker-like (2008) consensus on cooperative networks, mitigating resources constraints and competing within established disciplinary specific conventions. Involution appears to mitigate daunting production processes among a cohort of projectariat who face continued personal and creative issues of ‘just’ and ‘almost’ enough.
These practices could be categorized as the entry costs to contemporary creative fields or what McRobbie (2018) identifies as the neoliberal disposif of creative labour: entrepreneurial; self-disciplined; and career focused. Yet, this involuted complexity also induces cognitive, emotional and physical burdens carried by individuals, or burnout. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han (2015) attributes twenty-first-century burnout to an exhaustion of the self and a culture of excess positivity where the constant pressure to appear (less be) successful drives harmful practices, that is, self-exploitation (McRobbie, 2018). Burnout is not merely physical exhaustion but also leads to an exhaustion of the self. This means that incessant demands for self-optimization within the field and wider social relations can lead to an inner depletion. Social actors are increasingly unable to grasp a sense of an authentic self, which in the context of this research interpretably implicates the quality and quantity of creative labour practices and outcomes. Furthermore, the overstimulating effects of social media and platform capitalism (‘Hey Besties, come to my new show!’), combined with prevalent displays of success and competitive social ranking systems (‘Sold out!;’ ‘Top 10 this week on Spotify Australia Playlist!’) intensify feelings of burnout (Woods & Davis, 2024). This constant engagement and the general inability to disconnect (or switch off) often lead to distraction and mental exhaustion, exacerbating burnout.
Although located at homologous positions within creative fields, and as mostly younger entrants yet to establish career-defining recognition while negotiating macro-fields, our respondents were weary. In the context of post-COVID-19 creative industries, and having performed the entrepreneurial discourse, they still communicated strategies to manage the emotional strains of generating field recognition: positive reviews; sales; grants; and a rising reputation. But they also intimated that a notable consequence of involuted cultural production is fatigue: People are exhausted. I think total overhaul of capitalism would be my recommendation, otherwise I don’t know how the theatre could be sustainable. (Dramaturg) It's been a wild time. I’m a bit tired. I feel like especially people are doing a lot of stuff for free or with very little funding … you have to fight to make a difference. (Visual artist) Creative process does take a lot of time and you need like space to be able to let it work at its natural pace, but there's a constant pressure from consumerism and you know capitalism that it's kind of a bit of a war between the two. (Fashion designer) I think I could be busier, but it gets to a point where it starts to get really overwhelming. (Dancer) I ended up doing a job [outside creative practice] of 2½ people. I was just, I was tired all the time, I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do … it forced me to actually stop and think, what I want to do with my life? … I was feeling a bit burnt out by it all. (Jeweller) I suppose having the studio was probably the most successful project that I have done because I had that for almost five years. It was originally supposed to be a Renew [free rent] project, but I negotiated with my landlord a low rent … sometimes if you get [grants] from the City Council, they’re only $1,000 or $2,000. And I would use that money to pay everyone else, and it was like, ‘there's no point,’ there's not enough return on this to make it viable for my time. I feel pretty burnt out by all the exploitation. (Dancer) … then the scholarship finished, and the fellowship picked up, which is a similar amount of money, not very much, it's below the poverty level, like I’m not paying myself. (Dancer) I just don’t think people realize just to even write the grant! I counted how many hours it took to write the last grant; it was 100 h. That's a lot of time and that's not even a new project, that's my old project! You know what I mean? (Visual artist) While I’m able to support this [artistic labour] at times it's emotionally heavy to just kind of realize that no one's buying, nothing's really moving, grants getting rejected, it can be kind of very stressful. Like it's hard to imagine something from this stage to a stage where I’d be able to draw money out of my art account just to pay myself. (Visual artist)
Conclusion
Owing to budget constraints and time this is not a study mapping the depth and breadth of involuted practice, longitudinal outcomes of burnout for creative labour, or fine-grained actuarial analysis of income receipts and timesheets, all of which deserve their own studies. However, by using the illustrative method this article explored how the intersection of neo-Bourdieusian fields and Geertz's descriptions of involution foregrounds the adaptability of emerging creatives. They respond to the field's logics by intensifying the flexibility and malleability of cultural production: art is hard driven; cultural forms adapted, re-used, expanded, re-worked, transposed and reimagined; and commoning occurs through intricate, uncodified, webs of affiliation surrounding creative projects. This illustration of the weft and weave of involuted labour foregrounds how the contemporary creative industries induce a productivity paradox; more art and symbolic texts are produced yet in orthodox economic terms this often wageless productivity remains marginal, with little account for the stressors and burnout induced when artists struggle to stay connected to creative fields.
Considering the theme of this special issue – equity in the creative industries – our theorization of involuted creative labour and burnout suggests locating emergent creative labour (the ‘almost and just enoughs’) within inter-field relations: overlapping bureaucratic demands conditioned by the field of the state; material conditions embedded in fields where labour reproduction occurs; and the autonomy/heteronomy tension within creative fields. As it stands, none of these fields fully acknowledge nor immediately supply the time, resources and mental space necessary for artistic creation. If the creative industries are considered socially and culturally beneficial how could overlapping fields be adjusted to produce and reward a wider societal belief in meritocracy? Here post-neoliberal political experiments in basic income and the de-commoditization of creative labour are suggestive (see Whiting et al., 2024, in this issue). Such policies might free-up the resources and time needed to produce new works and to build reputations without exhausting participants. This is then a question of how could the material and symbolic rewards of creative fields be expanded outside creative fields to generate meritocracy for creative labour?
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors thank participants at the Sociology of Work panel at The Australian Sociological Association 2022 Conference, University of Melbourne and the Equity in the Creative Industries workshop held at the University of Western Sydney in December 2023 for providing initial critiques. Thanks also to the Special Edition editors and the two anonymous reviewers for helping us refine an earlier version of this article. All other errors and omissions are our own.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by a Flinders University College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences research grant.
Author Biographies
Michael Scott is a sociologist of cultural production and urban cultural economies who engages with classical and contemporary social theory to analyse current trends and institutions. His research interests include theorizing entrepreneurial action within the creative industries and the state–market nexus of cultural production. He has previously published in Poetics, Cultural Sociology, Progress in Human Geography, City, Culture and Society and the International Journal of Cultural Studies.
Christopher Woods researches the intersection of entrepreneurship, organization, and technology, with an empirical interest in the cultural and creative industries. His doctoral research developed a digital first-perspective of entrepreneurship, complementing existing approaches to management studies by isolating the digital as an evolving organizational phenomenon.