The Rise of the Joyful Economy

Artistic invention and economic growth from Brunelleschi to Murakami

Michael Hutter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317636366
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book argues for the increasing importance of the arts as a major resource in fuelling growth through the experiential dimension of today's economy. As we move from the knowledge economy to a new stage called the joyful economy, consumers shift their spending from physical objects and technical know-how to experiences of joy and disappointment.

This book investigates how artistic ideas are translated into successful commercial production, and how economic growth impacts artistic invention. It examines cases of successful innovation in the creative industries ranging from the Italian Renaissance to the present. The book suggests a framework where social players move in diverse worlds of value, which leads to a stream of controversies and manias that result in the establishment of new joy products. Studies include the effect of linear perspective, as pioneered by Filippo Brunelleschi, the discovery of taste as an argument for consumption, the serial production of Pop Art and the self-commercialization of contemporary works by artists like Takashi Murakami .

This theoretical and empirical study brings together the fields of cultural economics, economic sociology, management studies and cultural history. In doing so, it offers a fascinating study of how creativity has shaped and fuelled commerce.

1

A FRAMEWORK OF CREATIVE IRRITATION

Products that deliver experiences, with sensations and memories, are quite distinct from products that deliver objects, like cars, or services, like tax consulting. A car can be used many times, but the experience is gone. It might be repeated, like seeing a movie for the second time, but the sensations and the memories will be less exciting. New products for new experiences are desired and sought. But how can such products be invented if it is unknown which qualities users will find exciting? How do larger innovations, those that shape the developments of a creative industry, take hold? What drives the growth of the creative industries if the users don’t know what to expect and the providers don’t know what to deliver?

To answer these questions, it is helpful to think of creativity in terms of social interaction, rather than individual behavior.¹

Joy products contain a carefully calibrated dose of surprise. To generate such surprise among users, it takes misunderstandings, accidents, and other events with uncertain outcomes—therefore the uncertain success of any novelty. Artistic activities, performed in scenes with artists, objects, audiences, and media, are particularly disposed to generate the surprises, misunderstandings and accidents that might be consumed, in a new customized form, as an experience worth paying for. Some form that initially made sense in an artistic context gains recognition in a commercial context, without losing its value in the original world of meaning. Vice versa, the economic conditions surrounding artistic creation might be reflected in aesthetic forms that find recognition in artistic worlds. Like mutual motors, these processes of invention in distinct worlds of meaning drive each other to a continuous (yet hardly constant) flow of inventions.

In this chapter, this central idea is developed in greater detail, and its traces in various social sciences are pursued.

Creative irritations between plays of value

Economy and art—plays of value

The assumption that society’s change and growth is shaped by a small number of large worlds of meaning that generate their own standards of value is shared by several prominent approaches in sociological literature. These positions will be briefly described below. Before doing so, I want to argue that there are advantages to interpret such worlds of meaning as “plays of value.”

The notion of play implies that certain sequences of communication acts, connected with more or less material movement, are able to engage humans as participants and to delineate their own playing field.² They are “self-bordering” because every contribution to the ongoing interaction carries with it the message that it is part of that play and that it has a certain value only in that kind of play.³ It is useful to distinguish between the abstract category of a play, with its particular logic, the kinds of games that have developed using the play’s particular logic, and the rounds, matches, or episodes that are actually performed: matches in basketball games that follow the logic of “fair sports play,” museum expositions that follow the logic of artistic quality, or auction rounds where lots are sold for money. The moves in the games follow rules that were developed in the play. The players, as well as others who have experience in observing the players and their game moves, recognize the presence, the aliveness of a particular play.

Plays, in the interpretation chosen here, are highly ordered and rigorously reduced in the variety of accepted moves in their games.⁴ Thus, they distinguish themselves from all the other events occurring in the bustle of ordinary life. Although each single episode of a game is temporary and ephemeral, their repetition follows a stable pattern of order, and the games continue for long periods of time. In many cases, the games are coordinated and constitutionalized through organizations. Within these organizations, rule changes can be decided, like new basketball rules, or collection guidelines, or auction proceedings, but the continuity of the particular species of game within their larger play of value depends on the engagement and the skills of all the players who participate in them. Of course, it might be argued that societies are constituted by the total number of players, but it is just as true that contemporary society is constituted by the plays of value that have evolved during the past centuries.

To understand the coordination in play, the notion of value is essential. It connects the mental state of the players with the observable state of a game. Values, on a physiological level, are sensory data: color values, pitch values, odor values. The data are fed to the nervous system without its conscious participation. A small part of the signals reaches symbolic perception. Symbolic perception demands the ability to recognize meta-distinctions: a sound, sign, or written mark is charged with a second meaning. This symbolic meaning is then expressed in terms of worth, quality, or greatness, and their opposites. The worlds in which these charged distinctions carry meaning, are the worlds of play. Players in each of these plays develop their own sense of value, their judgments as to which moves have greater quality than others.

Plays of value employ symbols and enact them time and again. They have to be enacted in repetition because the play’s “reality” takes place only during these events. For those participating, the performance is not an irrelevant, peripheral event. It transports a feeling, an engagement with value. In such events, the individual feels the solace or wrath of his or her God, or the transfer of power from one ruler to the next. The value codes position the individual in social space, and that sensation is every bit as real, and by no means playful, for the players as the perception of objects in physical space.⁵

The value scales operating in these large plays are not conscious to the agents, and they function precisely because of their unconscious performance. Yet, actors in today’s globalized worlds are quite skilled in playing the games of different plays of value simultaneously. They might reflect upon them in other plays, like the play of science, which we are presently engaged in. The choice of the notion of play, for the purposes of this study, is in itself a move on a playing field called research.

That field of research is marked by several well developed approaches that do make use of the terms play, game, performance, player and playing field. But none of these approaches makes play its central term.

As a prominent pattern in the development of society, play was discovered by a cultural historian. In 1938, Johan Huizinga demonstrated the pervasiveness of play in civilizations throughout history: “[Play] creates order, it is order. It brings temporally limited perfection into an imperfect world and confused life. Play demands rigorous order. The slightest aberration spoils the play, takes away its character and destroys its value” (Huizinga 1949: 17). Huizinga’s study of the linguistic roots of the term show its universal ambivalence of meaning between such rigorous order and notions of childish or inconsequential behavior.⁶

One could argue that play found already earlier access to sociological theory. Symbolic interaction theory starts with individuals who are capable of playing games. Mead distinguishes the play of children—which imitates the responses of others—from the games into which the developed selves of individuals are involved. The players assume the attitudes of other players, as they follow the logic or “morale” of a game (Mead 1926: 216ff). During the 1960s, the logical restrictions of social interaction came into closer focus. On the formalist end, strategic interdependence was cast into the axioms of economic game theory. Games were recognized as fundamental constellation, even if the set is restricted to the simplicity of board games. Erving Goffman, in two essays published in 1969, outlined a much richer theory of games that preserves the complexity of play.⁷ Goffman interprets social communication in terms of expression games, with observers assessing the messages of subjects, and vice versa. He speaks of moves, rather than (game-theoretical) choices (Goffman 1969: 90). Most of his examples are from the political playing field, but eventually he considers “games for fun.” He observes that

the parties must start with the shared sentiment that winning within the rules is desirable and significant... Once the world of the game has been jointly achieved, then a good or lucky move can become a meaningful gain.

(1969: 143)

Goffman did not pursue this line of inquiry. His “frame analysis” (1974) focuses on the social prerequisites of individual experiences.

In Niklas Luhmann’s theory of society (1996, 2012, 2013), the processes of communication that distinguish themselves from their social environment are called “social systems.” Luhmann’s conception of these “autopoietic systems” shares essential features with plays of value.⁸ Value codes have evolved around fundamental challenges for social coordination, giving rise to communication arrangements with media and value codes that are specific to the challenge in question. They allow interactions to become more precise and more complex at the same time. All the messages in such a subsystem within society are coded with the same specific value distinction that operates in all the messages of the system—the initial condition of any play. The term “subsystem” recalls the Parsonian heritage, but in Luhmann’s world, these subsystems are able to reproduce themselves, and their evolution is interdependent with the moves made in all the surrounding value-coded systems. It is Luhmann’s suggestion to consider the effects of such interdependence as instances of irritation (1997: 789ff).

Pierre Bourdieu’s model of society is built around the notion of “field” (1966, 1983). Fields permit observations beyond rigid classes, even if power structures are still assumed to rule them. Fields are constituted by the positions of social actors and their relationships. Fields have demarcations, and the actors cooperate. Economic capital, valid in commercial fields, is distinguished from cultural capital, valid in artistic fields. The metaphor of play is in the background, as this quote from the English Wikipedia’s Bourdieu post indicates: “Agents subscribe to a particular field not by way of explicit contract, but by their practical acknowledgement of the stakes, implicit in their very playing of the game’.”⁹

The theory of fields has been advanced markedly by Neil Fligstein’s and Doug McAdam’s theory of strategic action fields. In these fields, actors not only cooperate, they also compete, either alone or in teams. Challengers, with new ideas, can upset incumbents, in observable “episodes of contention.” Summarizing their impressive theoretical apparatus, they write: “Strategic action fields represent recurring games. Even in stable fields, the game is being played continuously... the rules, composition, and structure of the field will be in play constantly” (2012: 31–32). Fligstein and McAdam’s conception of fields comes very close to the plays of value introduced above. The application clearly chooses the political play or action field as the central and normal ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of plates
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 A Framework of creative irritation
• Part I Economic responses to artistic invention
• Part II Artistic responses to economic change
• Bibliography
• Index