Abstract
How do we understand the psychic life of cultural workers under neoliberalism? ‘Hope labour’ is a defining quality of a cultural worker’s experience, practice and identity. Hope labour is unpaid or under-compensated labour undertaken in the present, usually for exposure or experience, with the hope that future work may follow. Hope labour is naturalised by neoliberal discourses but not fully determined by them. Drawing upon empirical research investigating the ‘creative industries’ in the North East of England, we ask how hope labour is made meaningful and worthwhile for cultural workers positioned as entrepreneurial subjects, despite its legitimisation of power asymmetries. We develop Foucauldian studies of governmentality by addressing how cultural work is lived through neoliberal categories, demonstrating the conflicting discourses and relations to self involved in the constitution of entrepreneurial subjectivity. We make a novel contribution to an understanding of hope and precarity by illustrating how cultural workers begin to occupy the site of the entrepreneurial subject amidst conflicting configurations of hope, desire, anxiety and uncertainty.
Highlights
Significant changes in the landscape of work in industrialised economies over the past four decades have been well documented
Governmentality has obscured practice as a situated, agentive and temporal process in the conduct of everyday life (McKinlay et al, 2012; Walters, 2012). We address this limitation by examining the psychic life of cultural work and the practices of the self that serve to constitute subjectivity
Rather than ‘living with’ an enterprise economy (Storey et al, 2005), our analysis highlights how people ‘live through’ and struggle inwardly with neoliberal categories that attempt to define, animate and subsume them as ‘entrepreneurs of the self’ (Foucault, 2008). We suggest that such a reading complements Foucauldian studies of governmentality whilst contributing to a ‘hopeful sociology’ (Alacovska, 2018, 2019) of cultural work: a project that can encourage alternative ways of conceptualising and enacting work beyond neoliberal imperatives of deferred security and upward mobility, and towards a more far-reaching reframing of creative and cultural human labour (Lee, 2017)
Summary
Insecurity and the deregulation of waged labour is coupled with fundamental changes to the welfare state and a shift from state-led provision to social insecurity (van Dyk, 2018). Cultural workers have not typically been understood as submissive populations (De Peuter, 2014), yet, to voluntarily choose unpaid or undercompensated labour to gain autonomy in one’s work is no longer an act of dissent (Lorey, 2009, 2015) Rather, it is precisely such alternative forms of living and working that have become naturalised and obvious in their governmental function (McRobbie, 2016). Individuals are designated as agents of their own trajectories, capable of navigating precarious situations with scant guidelines for action, and where the career is made in relation to the self, not the organisation (Svejenova, 2005) This mode of reasoning dissolves the distinction between labour and capital, work and leisure, producing an image of the self as a productive and individualised subject (Read, 2009). These conflicting relations to self are not restricted to specific groups, such as elite orchestral musicians (Scharff, 2016), but can encompass diverse forms of cultural and creative labour in the play of ‘hope’ labouring, echoing the conditions of neoliberal work and employment more generally
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