Consultants and the global assemblage of culture and creativity

Abstract

Culture and creativity have been increasingly instrumentalised in policy programmes worldwide in recent decades. This has been associated with the rapid development of techniques for quantifying and measuring the sector. This paper argues that the development of these techniques has been central to the mobility of policies and policy concepts that instrumentalise culture and creativity. Using Ong and Collier's notion of global assemblage, it is argued that culture and creativity have been rendered technical in relation to the invention and circulation of a number of interlinked global forms, such as the ‘creative industries’ and the ‘creative class’, which are embedded in abstract, placeless, technical systems that provide them with an apparent universality. How this is achieved is examined in detail through a discussion of the work of a London‐based consultancy specialising in cultural knowledge. The consultancy helps to produce this assemblage by doing the work of producing technical, calculative measures of culture and creativity that translate a messy social world into a set of ordered, rationalised representations that can be compared to similarly produced representations from elsewhere. Their work helps to convert topographical connections between places into topological relations across which appropriate global forms can move with relative ease.