A research workshop on the book Kurieitibu de Are: Atarashii Bunka Sangyo to Jenda (Kadensha, 2023), the Japanese translation of Angela McRobbie’s Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries (2016) was held at Fukutake Hall on July 23rd, 2023. The workshop was co-organized by Toko Tanaka Laboratory and the Association for Cultural Typhoon. Three translators, Chiharu Chujo (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies), Kasumi Nakamura (Keio University), and Kazuma Takezaki (Meiji University) presented at the workshop. The translation supervisor Professor Toko Tanaka acted as coordinator, and Professor Natsuno Kikuchi (Nagoya City University) was invited as commentator. Around 250 people applied for the event with 20 joining on the spot and more than 100 joining online.

Three presenters first summarized the discussions in each chapter (Nakamura: Chapters 1&2, Chujo: Chapters 3&4, Takezaki: Chapters 5&6) and introduced the background and intellectual and political significance. The first two chapters analyzed the work style pursued by the newly expanded urban middle class in the UK, in which they receive rewards for multi-skilled, multi-faceted, creative work efforts. Although the lack of a fixed workplace results in decreased access to welfare and increased exposure to risk and precarity, this is compensated by “the romance of being creative.” The same structure further unfolds in the art industry, women’s emotional labor, and Berlin’s fashion scene, discussed in Chapters 3-6. The presenters contextualized the cases and explained how the dispositif continuously reproducing these realities is constituted.

After the presentations, Professor Kikuchi provided stimulating ideas based on her long-established academic interest. She emphasized the fact that in the workplace, women are forced to embrace their own individual “upward mobility” because there is no homosocial “upward route” for them, and that this upward mobility is both a “line of flight” from the restrictive structures and a place of “capture” (101) by neoliberal capitalism as well. After the presenters had responded, referring to their own fieldwork experience, members of the audience raised further important questions. For example, one person, who had started working in the television industry this year, raised the issue of difficulties in the workplace and the obstacles to reporting these difficulties. Lively discussions lasted until the very end.

Text: Kaiwen Liu (PhD student)
Photo: Kyosuke Yamamoto (PhD student)
English proofreading: David Buist（Project Senior Specialist)