Abstract
This article argues that while creative spaces are believed to instigate creative production, their strongest value is in producing new possibilities for self-organizing. By zooming in on short snapshots of resistance against gentrification in creative spaces in Amsterdam, I investigate whether small-scale and grass-roots forms of resistance and self-organizing between independent workers in the creative industries can be understood as examples of the autonomist notions of ‘the common’ and ‘the multitude’. By placing observations of creative workers’ self-organizing practices alongside autonomist theory, I suggest that autonomist thought is a promising philosophy for a politicized view of creative production, because it celebrates multiplicity and uniqueness. This is a timely topic in a society with growing numbers of freelancers and increasing flexibilization of labour. This article contributes to research on self-organizing among creative workers and to the literature on work conditions in the creative industries.
Introduction
Cultural studies scholars are increasingly interested in how the production of cultural goods is organized (Gill and Pratt, 2008; McRobbie, 2015; Ross, 2009, 2012). One reason for this is the rise of policies worldwide instigating what has become known as the creative industries, and which before that was variously known as the cultural industries, or the culture industry (O’Connor, 2010), prompting scholars to study this institutional reframing. Recent research on this matter has suggested that artists are now taken as the example of entrepreneurial resilience (Gielen, 2013), because they have always had to deal with the fact that their work is irregular, uncertain and lowly paid (Gielen, 2015; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2010, 2011). Furthermore, McRobbie (2015) has argued that the artistic, creative or bohemian way of life is now the preferred lifestyle of young, middle-class workers, so much so that they are willing to sacrifice any social security that would have come with ‘traditional’ employment. Further empirical research has indeed shown that freelancers have a low income and hardly any social security (Avdikos and Kalogeresis, 2016; MacKinlay and Smith, 2009).
The precarity of creative workers has led to a renewed interest in autonomist theory among this group, as well as among the people studying them. Autonomism is a political philosophy rooted in the Italian radical left of the 1970s. Autonomism has recently entered the domain of cultural studies (Gielen, 2015; Lash, 2006; Muldoon, 2014; Olma and Koukouzelis, 2007) in order to understand, for instance, workers in hospitality (Dowling, 2007) and the media industry (Mattoni, 2012). But most of all, and predating cultural studies scholars’ interest, autonomist theory has also been read and used by artists and art theorists to make sense of their political position (McRobbie, 2011). Rather than being predictive, autonomist concepts are very powerful in that they help people imagine their communities differently. Hence, this study should be read as an attempt to understand the discursive power of autonomist ideas, rather than an attempt to test the validity of this ‘theory’.
Although these ideas will be developed further in the next section, the core idea of autonomism is that the multitude – in the sense of the accumulated creative and social potential of a mass of people – is always there, even when it is not organized for capital to take advantage of it (Muldoon, 2014). The multitude is understood as the possibility of a cooperation between minds, without (and before) the intervening of capital or industry (Lazzarato, 2004). It is an alternative for the modern understanding of ‘the people’, which implies the presence of a state (Farneti, 2006). The common, then, is the political potential of this multitude (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 105).
In the first place, the choice for this framework emerged out of discussions in the artistic community in Amsterdam that I witnessed during my fieldwork on art factories. Influential in this was the MyCreativity Sweatshop symposium, held in Amsterdam at the alternative nightclub Trouw in November 2014. This event brought together the politicized voices of artists, creative workers and theorists from the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, the United Kingdom and other neighbouring nexuses of creative and artistic production. Autonomist concepts, most notably ‘multitude’ and ‘the common’, cut through discussions between people who were practitioners, researchers, or both. Autonomism was in the air, for in the same year, an art factory that had developed out of a squat, and now acted as one of the most prominent venues for underground culture in Amsterdam, published a book called Autonomy by Dissent.
At the same time, finding empirical illustrations of the use of autonomist ideas also responds to a call made in academic research. While autonomist scholars themselves have pointed out that their ‘political project must clearly be grounded in an empirical analysis’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 105), it has also been noted that such grounding is still lacking (Hesmondhalgh, 2007; Valli, 2015), and this is precisely where this study aims to make a contribution.
Based on the observations made at the MyCreativity Sweatshop symposium, I concluded that autonomist ideas could indeed be seen as part of the discursive toolbox that practitioners of resistance can draw on (Graziano and Trogal, 2017; Mumby et al., 2017). I subsequently decided to study this discursive toolbox, by focusing on instances of organizing (Czarniawska, 2009; Sillince, 2010; Weick, 1979) which can happen in – or outside of – organizations, as well as in spite of those organizations (Czarniawska, 2013). While it will become clear that not all instances discussed in this article are examples of organizing, the primary aim for collecting and studying this empirical material was to detect the relationships between the (for the population at hand) seductive aspects of the redemptive fiction of autonomism (Farneti, 2006) on the one hand, and organizing on the other.
More concretely, this study provides a reflection, based on empirical material collected during ethnographic research among groups of creative workers in Amsterdam, on the concepts of the common and the multitude. I will show how creative workers try to resist being instrumentalized for the sake of helping neighbourhoods gentrify through the instalment of temporary creative hubs, called ‘art factories’ by local policy makers. These moments of resistance are studied as moments which are ‘organisational’ to different extents, in the sense that the resistance sometimes remains on a discursive level (i.e. voicing dissent or concern), and sometimes results in taking action and organizing (Mumby et al., 2017). I then wonder to what extent we can detect any impact of the common or the multitude in these organizing practices. In other words, can these people be said to act from a sense of ‘multitudeness’ (Farneti, 2006: 282) and if so, what difference does it make to how they organize?
The observations presented in this article are based on fieldwork at various creative hubs or so-called ‘art factories’ in Amsterdam. Zooming in on those moments I have identified as most explicitly exemplifying resistance against the art factory policy, I will suggest that these art factories foster a basis for social and political organization, next to providing a platform for innovation and synergy. Thus, I will argue that although these spaces may benefit creative production (Clare, 2013; Fuzi, 2015), their strongest value is in producing new possibilities for political organizing.
The structure of this article is as follows. First, I will present a concise explanation of autonomist philosophy, and in particular, the notions of common and multitude, in conversation with recent research into the practices of workers in the creative and cultural industries. Second, I will outline the empirical setting of Amsterdam’s art factories and explain the methodological approach. Third, I will present the four ‘snapshots’ taken from situations in art factories as well as from meeting points between policy makers or politicians and creative workers. These will serve to demonstrate how the people working in these places share a social identity or a political concern, as well as a professional interest, and that the former is often ignored because of its fleeting and ephemeral character. I will then argue that autonomist notions of the multitude and the common help us see the social and political potential of art factories or similar structures, while highlighting how existing policies and discourses sometimes prevent this potential from coming to fruition. Finally, I will summarize the contributions of this article as well as indicate further avenues for research.
The multitude, the common and creative work
Although the term autonomism covers a heterogeneous set of political philosophies, ranging from the Italian 1970s workerist movement, to situationism, to Bergsonism (Deleuze, 1988), and is represented by authors such as Antonio Negri, Maurizio Lazzarato, Paolo Virno and Franco Berardi, the core idea across these different currents is that the multitude and the common are ontologically prior to the workings of capital (Hardt and Negri, 2004). With this idea, autonomism moves ‘from a paradigm of material scarcity to one of immaterial abundance’ (Toscano, 2007: 74). This immaterial abundance exists in the realization that the subjective power of human beings, and the collective accumulation of that subjective power, always already exist before any economic or legal principle can claim or exploit it. For instance,
Lazzarato’s definition of the multitude focuses more on creation and invention. In his view, a multitude of different singularities enables ‘the cooperation between minds’, which then ‘expresses a power of co-creation and co-realisation’ (
The goal is to prevent this power of creation from being captured and exploited by capital (Lazzarato, 2006b). Indeed, this concern is the focus of Jones and Murtola’s (2012) article, in which they state that there is a potentially liberating element in the fact that work is increasingly incorporating ‘elements of life’ (p. 638), but that capitalism still has the capacity to expropriate this. In other words, the cooperation between minds is not enough. New forms of organization and representation have to be found in order to prevent expropriation. But what do these look like?
Whereas Lazzarato sees the multitude already as a ‘constructive power of cooperative life’ (Toscano, 2007: 75), Hardt and Negri think the multitude only reaches its political potential once it becomes the common. One of the ways in which this might be actualized is when new spaces and temporalities are created (Negri, 2003: 185). This might take on the form of political movements (Cuninghame, 2010; Lorey, 2015), but the common can also emerge out of workers’ initiatives. For instance, Gielen (2015) has argued that the decreasing status of cultural institutions gives way to an artistic multitude. Such ‘floating populations’ (Lazzarato, 2006a: 1) may become constitutive of a common.
But how is a group of individuals with a shared interest different from a multitude on its way to becoming a common? What do these concepts help us see? In the current study, snapshots are taken from situations of modest, perhaps even tiny, moments of resistance and self-organizing. By zooming in on these moments, I draw attention to the seeming mundaneness of these moments, in order to show the beginning of political self-organizing.
Empirical setting
Amsterdam has a specific policy and budget to transform empty property into broedplaatsen, which the city council translates as ‘art factories’. 1 Art factories accommodate Amsterdam’s creative and mostly self-employed workforce. These temporary structures, often reconfigured office buildings, schools or warehouses, provide workers in the cultural and creative industries with inexpensive workspace and sometimes living space, as well as the opportunity to network and collaborate with others, an aspect deemed important for creative workers (Loots et al., 2018).
During the time of fieldwork, the policy, managed by a separate department called Bureau Broedplaatsen (the Art Factory Bureau), fell under the responsibility of the urban planning department. The policy has existed since 1999 2 . and the fact that art factories are subsidized ensures that rents are below the market average (Peck, 2012). Most art factories are run by small companies which rent out entire buildings to artists, although some are run by groups of artists. Usually, these small companies apply for funding at the Art Factory Bureau in order to renovate a specific building (Cnossen and Olma, 2014).
The art factory policy originates in the late 1990s, when various subcultural groups were evicted from their cultural centres and semi-legal squats along the harbour of the city as a result of urban renewal initiatives (Peck, 2012: 468). As the property market reached a peak due to the economic boom of the 1990s, the city decided that the alternative cultural venues around the harbour that had emerged from the squatting scene of the 1980s had to disappear (Peck, 2012: 465) so that the harbour could become the city’s eye-catcher (Abrahamse et al., 2000). This led to protests initiated by the alternative scene and joined by leaders of museums and art schools, who understood that their institutions benefitted from the artistic underground (Uitermark, 2004).
These protests caused the city government to reserve a sum of 45 million euros for the facilitation of what would later become known as art factories. The first official document stating the mission of the policy, effective as of 2000, reads that these (living and) workspaces enlarge the quality, diversity and image of an area, they ‘produce’ culture, which adds to the cultural richness of the city […], and the social climate of the area is improved by offering facilities to the neighbourhood.
3
In spite of these idealistic origins (
Although research shows that creative workers prefer to work in a stimulating environment (Clare, 2013; McRobbie, 2015; Sihvonen and Cnossen, 2015), many of the independent workers mentioned that they did not feel that the exact location of their work contributed significantly to their professional progress, nor that they had started new ventures or projects with their neighbours (although some had). Instead, they emphasized things such as unexpected friendships or ‘having a space to think’. While these spaces are certainly used for the execution of paid and unpaid work, sociality seemed to be of vital importance as well. It is precisely this element that paves the way for the modest yet intriguing examples of political organizing that emerged during the period of research. Although the ‘political-ness’ of the snapshots will differ, each is characterized by an awareness of – and reluctance about – the use of creative spaces in the gentrification of urban areas, a process happening not just in Amsterdam but all around the world (Elwood, 2006; Valli, 2015; Warren, 2014; Wen, 2012). The snapshots will show how the workers in these art factories tried to resist the role they felt was attributed to them in these complex processes of urban change; that is, they refused to play the part of the ‘gentrifiers’.
Methodology
The research conducted for this article was inductive, yet started from an interest in situated meaning-making of the social actors studied (Yanow, 2012). The fieldwork for this article took place between November 2013 and August 2015. Although the aim was to gain a good overview of the field of art factories, most fieldwork took place at three art factories: A Lab (opened September 2013), Broedplaats ACTA (opened September 2012; capacity doubled per January 2014) and Beehive Cruquiusweg (opened February 2013). These were chosen in the first place because they each recently opened around the time that the fieldwork started, and therefore offered an opportunity to observe how self-organizing emerged within each building.
I gained access to the field through the organizations running these buildings and the initial plan was to conduct 2 months of full time research in each art factory. However, early in the research, the organization running Beehive Cruquiusweg became in conflict with the landlord of the warehouse which housed the art factory. After it became clear that the conflict would not be resolved, several of its tenants decided to set up their own art factory together elsewhere. Dropping by at weekly internal meetings as well as meetings with city officials allowed me to follow them as they applied for funding, decided on a name and eventually moved into a new warehouse.
In the case of ACTA and A Lab, the fieldwork consisted of almost daily participant observation, for instance, through informal conversations with tenants and members of the managing organization and participation in social events. Research at ACTA became a case of ‘observant participation’ (Moeran, 2009) when, after having proposed the research plan, I joined the living community of this art factory as a tenant, a move prompted as much by the housing shortage as by research interests. Staying as a tenant after the official research period allowed for a continuing development of my observations.
In addition to this immersive approach, I conducted 20 interviews with tenants across all three spaces, and three interviews with policy makers in order to deepen my reflections. I also attended two official events organized by the Art Factory Bureau in order to better situate these everyday practices against their institutional backdrop. Finally, I paid short visits to eight other creative hubs throughout the Netherlands by means of brief comparison with the three focal places.
Given the long duration of the fieldwork, the observations were analysed iteratively throughout the period of research. Open coding resulted in a long list of codes, which were clustered into themes to be explored further in interviews and chats. Some of these themes were as follows: the international character of art factories, being a freelancer by choice or by necessity, the importance of creativity in work and in life, and the challenges of self-organizing with fellow tenants. After the official period of fieldwork ended (July 2014), recurring visits to the various art factories, my continued involvement in ACTA, as well as events in or about art factories organized by the city council, allowed me to see if new information demanded a new interpretation of the empirical material. This led to a saturation of the data, meaning that previously identified codes and themes were found in the most recently gathered material as well, without new information challenging the previous analysis. After a final round of coding, I structured the codes into two overarching themes, or rather questions: (1) why are we here? and (2) who is in charge and why? Keeping these questions in mind, I chose four situations, or snapshots, which I deemed as most exemplary for these themes. They can be read as vignettes, which are written so as to emphasize the issue of self-organizing and autonomist potentiality from different angles, while leaving aside other aspects of the fieldwork in order to focus on the most relevant examples (Kvale, 2006) and without sacrificing readability (Sturdy et al., 2009: 66). As always, the selection of this material is a result of the type of access I had. Being involved at ACTA as a tenant as well as an in-house ethnographer, allowed me to adopt different roles and build up my relationship with the organization running the art factory (Cnossen, 2018). The first two vignettes are taken from moments where policy-makers and politicians meet; the final two are taken from situations of self-organizing among creative workers.
Snapshots
‘Only a pawn in their game’
A May afternoon in 2015, in a nightclub on the outskirts of the city. People enter the room, not sure what decorum is in place. The group is too large for everyone to introduce themselves to everyone, yet name tags are not handed out. I had received an invitation but no one seems to care whether I belong here. Looking around the room, quite a few faces are familiar. They belong to managers of art factories, heads of department at art schools, or people working for unions and associations for the arts. This afternoon is organized by the Art Factory Bureau and I recognize some of their staff in the back of the room, double-checking if the beamer is working. My invite addressed me as someone ‘involved in working with art factories’ and asked me to join the meeting in order to help ‘formulate a set of possibilities’ to impact municipal policies for art factories. Walking up to two people I knew, both of them leading small organizations fighting for affordable workspace for artists. I asked them what they thought their influence could be this afternoon. Both of them responded ‘none’, and mentioned this was merely an opportunity to get a sense of the debate: the tendencies, the terms being used.
Once seated, the discussion starts. It appears the hottest topic of today is a suggested change in policy, resulting in shorter rental leases for artists and other creative workers in art factories. The idea behind this is to make room for ‘young talent’ in need of space. Someone who introduces himself as an artist and musician gets up. ‘I can make a living with my work, but I know that I will not be able to afford a more expensive studio ten years from now’. This sets the stage for a heated discussion about whether it is realistic to expect self-employed workers in the arts or creative industries to increase their income over the course of a few years. Instead of waiting for the moderator to signal people, they have the floor and make sure they have a microphone, people simply shout. Then someone gets up and says, ‘Why did we not receive an invitation to this meeting? You want to change everything but this is about us, we are working in those places!’ He is part of a group of people who are tenants in one of the oldest art factories, situated in the old harbour area of the city. Another person who is also part of this group, stands up too and adds a few words in encouragement of her fellow tenant. The director of the Art Factory Bureau, who had been standing at the front next to the moderator, looks rather underwhelmed and answers: ‘Well, you know, you are here now’.
Now that it is clear that the group of artists or creative workers sitting in the back had not been invited today even though they are ‘involved in working with art factories’, the atmosphere shifts irreparably. The moderator announces the roundtables that are scheduled to commence any time now, and for a moment the situation seems to calm down. But before the mass accepts being directed into different settings in order to discuss other things, one of the unexpected attendees takes the stage again: ‘We are against forcing people to move out! With ‘we’ I mean us, the artists. But of course, nobody listens to us this afternoon. It’s like the great Bob Dylan song: We are only a pawn in their game’.
The anger of this group of tenants, of which this person is part, can be read against the belief that art factories are inherently autonomous because of their ties to the cultural squats of the 1980s and 1990s. These often rejected the authority of the city council and claimed to live according to their own rules (Breek and De Graad, 2001). As a result of this heritage, artists who resided in these cultural squats now refuse to accept that being a tenant of an art factory comes with strings attached. Whereas younger tenants often see temporariness – of the place or of the lease of their personal studio – as a price to pay for having such low rent, the generation of the protagonist of this snapshot does not see the relation to the city council and the art factory policy in terms of a transaction.
Another interesting aspect of this situation is the question of representation. This group was not invited to the event, although other invitees were, based on their so-called ‘involvement with art factories’, which should arguably include tenants as well. Going back to the guiding questions of why these people are here, and who is in charge, something peculiar is happening here. We are looking at an odd situation in which the people whom it concerns, and who are furthermore willing to add to the debate, are shut out, although it is not clear whether this has happened on purpose. At the same time, the people who are supposed to speak on their behalf (the two leaders of small organizations representing workers in art factories) seem to have no faith in the possibility of making an impact on the debate here, today. The uninvited artists are enacting the idea of the multitude, claiming that ‘this is about us’. Not only do they believe they should have been invited, but from the way they speak it is clear they feel they are entitled to speak on behalf of all artists and creative workers in art factories.
‘We cannot organize rebellion’
In March 2015, the alderman in charge of the art factory policy is about to retire, and a celebration is organized in his honour. The occasion brings together representatives of the three major organizations running art factories, some tenants and property developers hoping to hop onto the art factory bandwagon. In order to add content to the celebration, a set of interviews with some of these actors is planned to take place before the real party starts. The moderator invites Lotta and Micha 6 onto the stage. Lotta is one of the initiators of an art factory that had started out as a squat, and one of the driving forces behind the publication Autonomy by Dissent. During her interview on stage, she observes that ‘in this field we talk a lot about the ties with the squatting movement, but a squat is something very different from an art factory’. ‘We care about not making a profit’, Micha adds. Lotta then continues, ‘For us, it is not about success, but about experiment. That idea is disappearing. You invite us to appear on stage here, but that is the only common ground between us’. A property developer, also present at the event, responds to Lotta’s arguments in a slightly agitated manner, articulating the importance of commercial developers in setting up interesting, bohemian-looking yet commercially viable venues.
The moderator, pressed for time, moves on to the retiring alderman. He seems amused by the clash of ideologies that had just unfolded, in which the property developer represented the commercially driven regeneration of certain urban areas, and Lotta the left-wing notion that there should be room for creative and social experiment in the city, regardless of its lack of commercial viability, and asks the retiring alderman to respond to this tension. The latter muses on the evolutions of the field throughout his career in the diplomatic fashion of a true politician: ‘Urban life is about encounters, participation, empowerment. In the beginning, art factories were about the collective, now we see that people are more individualistic. It is still about autonomy, only now the autonomy is in entrepreneurship’. The moderator, eager to stir up the discussion, jumps in: ‘But just to be clear, I imagine that it would go way too far for an art factory manager to drive a Maserati, right?’, to which the alderman responds: ‘Well, the city council cannot organize rebellion, can it? I would say that that is our institutional constraint’.
In this snapshot, the tensions between these cultural squats and the art factories become even clearer. But instead of accusing the policy makers and politicians of not giving them what they deserve, Lotta and Micha place themselves completely outside of the situation of a transaction. They do so by saying that ‘what we do is different’ and by refusing to be seen in the light of ‘success’ and ‘output’. Their statement is possible because the place they run is jointly owned by the collective of artists ‘and people interested in an alternative way of living’, as Micha puts it. Thus, they are less dependent on the good will of the Art Factory Bureau. However, they were able to get a collective mortgage for their venue with the help of the Art Factory Bureau and could thus be seen as dependent on them. 7 Their claim to the original ideology of autonomous places and practices is met with scepticism by several attendees of the event. The about-to-be-former alderman makes the observation that it is up to the people ‘on the ground’ to organize rebellion against the current policy and political approach of the Art Factory Bureau, thereby illustrating the fact that he sees the city council (of which the Art Factory Bureau is part) as separate from this common or multitude, for which he chooses the metaphor of the ground.
‘But what kind of people will they be?’
At the end of that very same month, a group of people gathers in a dark warehouse in an industrial area in the east of the city. Some people look for electrical cords in order to switch on some improvised lighting. A young man serves excellent espressos from a machine in a trailer. When I mention that all cups on his serving platter are different, he answers, ‘I just take them along whenever I have a coffee somewhere. It means less work for the dishwashers, you know’. It seems property is an ambiguous idea here.
The most pressing topic on the agenda of this meeting is the funding application for the Art Factory Bureau that needs to be finalized. The group is trying to move elsewhere in order to stay together. There is an empty warehouse available further down the same road that would accommodate all of them. However, they need money. In preparation for this meeting, Rachel, a filmmaker with a lot of experience in community organizing had sent me a first draft of their plan. She hopes that everyone will have useful input this evening, so she can finish the application. Their current lease expires soon, so they must act fast.
The meeting turns to issues of governance for their new place. The organization who set up the current space, did not put rules in place and this resulted in illegal activities such as the sale of alcohol and marihuana. Artists travelling to Amsterdam from countries such as Portugal and Spain had camped out in the warehouse during the summer, throwing parties and making the place less suited for focused work. Rose, a young artist, is reluctant: ‘We have seen how easily it goes wrong’. A designer answers, ‘Well, everyone should be running this new organization we’re about to set up. It should be very transparent and open’. Rose: ‘But how will we make money?’; Rachel: ‘We will have more than 200 square metres to use as an event space. People can pay us to produce events for them, with all the accumulated creative know-how we have, that is very easy’. Rose looks even more worried. ‘But what kind of people will they be? Will they fit with us?’, she asks.
Here, the resistance consists not in confronting a politician, but rather of the difficulty of playing the game that comes with interacting with the institutional environment, for instance by applying for funding. While Rachel seems confident the group can manage a space together, it is also clear that the group is not one to play by the rules. The snapshot from this meeting shows that the real issue will be whether the group will be able to self-organize and achieve a style of governance that helps them play the game of getting funded and developing business.
Also, while there is a clear conceptualization of the group being positioned vis-a-vis the civil servants they have to convince, there is also an effort to exclude certain types of people from becoming members of the group. The current members warn each other of free riders and remind themselves to be wary of people who may see the space as a place for relaxation, not for production. Rose also worries about marketing their services to people from the surrounding area, because they may not fit into the common they are trying to constitute. This shows how self-organizing should not be romanticized either. The fact that a grass roots community emerges does not mean that anyone is always welcome (Joseph, 2002).
‘We have a lot to offer, but we need to get paid’
Similar topics were being addressed in the ongoing conversations with Adrienne, one of the initiators of Open ACTA. Several artists and creative workers in the ACTA art factory wanted to counter the way they were perceived by the local city council. In her carefully decorated office full of plants, differently coloured cups and full bookshelves, Adrienne explained what the aim was: ‘You see, we are an experiment. We’ve only just started out here, we are only just getting to know each other, and already they are onto us. We don’t want to be obligated to have these open house days where everyone comes in to see what we do. We want work! So, the idea is that we do offer ourselves to the neighbourhood, but not for free. There are budgets for local residents to organize social and cultural activities, as long as you don’t make money from those activities. If I would apply for that funding and use some of it as a fee for my work, that makes me commercial, and that’s not allowed. But the local supermarket is allowed to make revenue from the grocery shopping I do to organise my event! I’m trying to get them to see how strange this is’.
She continues, ‘The local council sees us as an alternative to social workers. The rationale is that artists can do fun things for the neighbourhood and that they do not need to get paid for it, because doing something for the community should be on a voluntary basis. We are trying to challenge that rationale by saying that we have a lot to offer, but that we need to get paid.
Another initiator of Open ACTA, an artist to whom I spoke on an earlier occasion, related it to the residents of the area: ‘My elevator pitch is that a group of people started this out of a desire to become part of a local economy, knowing that we, as a small community, are becoming part of the wider community’. She saw the Open ACTA project as something that brings people together within the building: ‘I had a wish to become part of something larger. With these people, a community is starting to take shape. With everything going on with Open ACTA, it starts to become fun and interesting. This wish is really becoming reality’.
Here, we see a situation in which a group is coming together to resist the idea that they should do unpaid work to brighten up the neighbourhood in exchange for their space. The ambitions of the Open ACTA project are very much articulated in political terms. ‘We want to offer an alternative to the discourse that makes artists self-exploit themselves’, one of the initiators said. Although the project is still in its beginning stage, it is clear that this group tries to think about not having their accumulated creativity expropriated from them under the pretence of volunteer work.
The discourse the Open ACTA initiators try to resist is not just one of devaluing artistic work, but also one of devaluing immigrant populations. The ACTA building is part of a borough with a large number of inhabitants from migrant backgrounds, criticized in local media for contributing to gentrification by displacing these groups (Griffioen, 2014). By targeting this migrant population as potential clients, for instance, for wedding photography, couture and cultural activities, the Open ACTA initiative counters the image of this borough as a cultural wasteland.
Discussion
While the snapshots presented illustrate power dimensions typical between populations of independent workers and those impacting their circumstances (politicians, policy makers), the real question is how autonomist philosophy helps to see those power relations in a new light. When we think of the definitions of multitude as a mass of singularities, or as minds acting in cooperation, or as a multiplicity that cannot be reduced to sameness, we see how the concept makes sense given recent changes in work at large. Jobs are increasingly about providing cultural, affective and emotional content (Lazzarato, 2006b), and producers of artistic and creative goods excel in those tasks. Whereas in the era of the factory, managers and workers avoided spontaneity, workers now have to be creative, innovative (Gielen, 2013). Most of all, they have to live their work (or work their life) (Lazzarato, 2004).
The policy behind these art factories is very much aware of the value that comes from the immaterial effects of this population’s work. Creative workers have hip and bohemian lifestyles, that enliven worn down neighbourhoods. They make clever use of symbolic and cultural capital whenever they showcase their work or organize their artistic practice in situ (Stahl, 2008). The policy facilitating art factories can act as a vehicle in expropriating these assets. What these snapshots, however different in nature, have shown is that the creative workers are aware of this and say: ‘this is ours’.
The occupations represented in the studied art factories range from musicians to computer coders, from fashion designers to Internet entrepreneurs and from visual artists to design-thinking consultants. However, their reasons for working in these building were often expressed in political terms. One person mentioned that ‘places like this resist corporate society’, a statement more hopeful than that of Jones and Murtola (2012). Nevertheless, it is clear that even though their organizing practices transcend their specific professional interests and often encompass political motives, the art factories are not to be seen as places of leisure and recreation only. Socializing is certainly a part of this, but the focal point of these places is production. Only by understanding such places as inherently – indeed ontologically – productive, can we begin to capture their potential for producing a new politics.
The usefulness of autonomism is the new images it offers of worker resistance. In times of immaterial labour, where products are affective, aesthetic and symbolic, the image of a multitude consisting of individuals making a living out of uniqueness in lifestyle is appealing (Eikhof and Haunschild, 2006; Stahl, 2008). McRobbie (2015) has already argued that the myth of uniqueness, intricately linked to a passion for creative production and the belief in one’s talent, is strong enough to eradicate people’s desires for basic social security. Therefore, if we want to create possibilities for a politicized understanding and indeed a political organization for this type of creative production, such a politics must be based on a perception of creative work as originating from multiplicity.
This is precisely what the ‘redemptive fiction’ (Farneti, 2006) of the multitude and the common proposes. Its ‘productivist ontology’ (Morgan Parmett, 2012: 178) holds that creative production contains the seed of political possibilities, and the organization that needs to come with it. Independent creative workers’ disdain for traditional forms of political organization is rooted in the intuition that these forms are out of touch with their reality. Autonomist theory provides a way for a professional demographic that makes their living out of uniqueness (artists and other creative producers) to make a collective stance against expropriation based on their singularity. What the images of the multitude and the common propose is an interesting type of political organizing: to become not one out of many, but many out of many.
Conclusion
The point of this article has not been to empirically prove the existence of the phenomena that autonomist theorists such as Lazzarato and Negri have called the common and the multitude, but rather to offer some clues for how we can think through ‘multitudeness’ (Farneti, 2006: 282) in temporary urban creative hubs. The ‘redemptive fiction’ (Farneti, 2006) of the multitude helps understand that the real potential of such temporary places is not only in fostering creative collaboration, but also in acting as testing grounds for new instances of self-organizing across boundaries of profession, discipline and expertise. These instances of self-organizing should be understood in political terms as micro-foundations for a future common, something that may provide new structures of solidarity for self-employed creative workers.
The redemptive fiction of autonomism paints a vague picture of the political subject that may constitute the common, and earlier research has criticized it for this reason. Several authors have pointed at the feminization of creative work, most notably in fashion (Larner and Molloy, 2009; McRobbie, 2015), in order to argue that precarity affects people of different genders differently. Other research has pointed out that creative city policies risk marginalizing people of colour (McLean, 2014), making resistance practices a matter of potentially killing two birds with one stone, as the Open ACTA initiative shows. Finally, entrance to the workforce that makes up the creative industries is not equally available to all (Leung, 2016).
As a result, further research will be needed in order to better theorize if and how the multitude and common can still work for groups with large differences in terms of access to work, as well as other privileges. Although some diversity was found in terms of ethnic background and gender, the majority of the people who resided in the spaces that were the focus of this study were white and highly educated. Hence, despite the international character and wide variety of professions found in this study, the relative homogeneity in terms of social class could be considered a limitation for the study of the performative effects of the autonomist vocabulary, and generalizability of this study cannot be claimed.
Nevertheless, this study contributes to knowledge of the self-organizing practices of creative and cultural workers by highlighting the political aspects of temporary creative spaces, which are ubiquitous in many cities (Avdikos and Kalogeresis, 2017; Fuzi, 2015; Spinuzzi, 2012). By zooming in on the specific institutional context of the city of Amsterdam, I have illustrated the various power dynamics at play when independent workers who find each other within and across these spaces start to challenge the policies and regulations that brought them there in the first place. While much research focuses on the potential of such creative spaces in terms of generating new ventures and innovative creative output, I have shown how these spaces may also form a testing ground for micro-level forms of social security aiming to improve the work conditions for independent workers in the creative industries.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all respondents and organisations which took part in this research. This article is dedicated to the memory of Julien Haffmans.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the NWO (grant number 407-12-008), the University of Amsterdam’s CIRCA programme, and the Kunstenbond.