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The Systems Model
of Creativity: Analyzing the Distribution of Power in the Studio
PART 2
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Phillip McIntyre
University of Newcastle, NSW.
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4 Agency, Structure and Power
Fields are thus spaces where
struggles for dominance take place and those struggles are centred on economic,
social, cultural and symbolic factors. In making this claim one needs to emphasise the diffuse power relationships
that often exist implicitly within the operation of the field in cultural
production. ‘The state of the power relations in this struggle depends on the
overall degree of autonomy possessed by the field, that is, the extent to which
it manages to impose its own norms and sanctions on the whole set of producers’
(Bourdieu 1994: 60). In this case a record producer, engineer, musician or
A& R person who possesses the social, cultural or economic competence to
operate within the studio environs will have greater leverage than those who
don’t. It appears to be a fact of studio life. One could go a step further and claim
that the reason a producer, engineer or session musician is hired or financed
by record companies in the first place is for their possession of all of the forms
of capital outlined by Bourdieu.
A producer’s ability, for example, to
make decisions, be they organizational, technical or musical ones will be
circumscribed by their studio competence which is itself dependent on their
immersion in and an understanding of the domain of record production. Their
power to get others to make decisions in their favor is also both constrained
and enabled by their connections to the field, the social hierarchy that holds
the domain as a central part of its operation. This is to say that a record
producer’s agency, the ability to make and effect decisions, is dependent on the
structures, principally the domain and field, they encounter and surround
themselves with. As such their freedom to act is relative to the domain and
field they work in and not, as a Romantic view of creativity would have it, a
case of having no impediments to their action. This
kind of relative free will ‘does not presuppose a random universe, but neither
does it allow the possibility that all choices are themselves forced outside
circumstances’ (Teichmann & Evans 1991: 45). Free will in this case is always
circumscribed by structural factors. This position runs counter to the idea of the
absence of constraint; an idea held as a deep belief in Romantic circles and one
which constitutes one of their central myths.
Theories that
invoke social mechanisms and determinisms in order to explain our apparently
most personal and free actions are often understood as being equivalent to a
pure and simple negation of the realities that we call freedom and the
personality’ (Bouveresse in Shusterman 1999: 48).
However, as Pierre Bourdieu argues:
those who think
in simple alternatives need to be reminded that in these matters absolute
freedom, exalted by the defenders of creative spontaneity, belongs only to the
naïve and the ignorant’ (Bourdieu 1996: 235).
It is the conception of the relative nature of free will which adds a complex dimension to the nature of
the subject, their ability to act freely and, from there, the power they wield.
From this perspective an agent, be they producers, musicians or engineers or indeed
powerful record company people are always dependent on structure and the
structures an agent encounters allow the possibilities that an agent is
predisposed to choose from (Toynbee 2000). Bourdieu suggests that the interplay that results from
the way agency and structure operate makes practice possible. For him the tool
used to link agency and structure is habitus. Habitus has been described as:
a ‘feel for the game’, a ‘practical sense’ (sens
practique) that
inclines agents to act and react in specific situations in a manner that is not
always calculated and that is not simply a question of conscious obedience to
rules. Rather it is a set of dispositions which generates practices and
perceptions. The habitus is the result of a long process of inculcation,
beginning in early childhood, which becomes a ‘second sense’ or a second nature
(Johnson in Bourdieu 1993: 5).
The resolution of the relationship
between agency, and the structures producers work with, the conventions and
traditions of the domain, as well as the norms, values and beliefs pertinent to
their field knowledge, are thus crucial to an understanding of the way power
operates in relation to studio practice. From this perspective:
practice is always informed by a sense of
agency (the ability to understand and control our own actions), but that the
possibilities of agency must be understood in terms of cultural trajectories,
literacies and dispositions (Schirato & Yell 1996: 148).
Hank Shocklee, while he may not have
meant to align himself with these ideas, may have been right when he declared that
‘there’s always structure’ (2007). Janet Wolff agrees and also points out that,
everything a cultural producer does is located inside,
and thus affected by, the structures they deal with:
It does not follow
from this that in order to be free agents we somehow have to liberate ourselves
from social structures and act outside them. On the contrary, the existence of
these structures and institutions enables any activity on our part, and this
applies equally to acts of conformity and acts of rebellion…all action,
including creative or innovative action, arises in the complex conjunction of
numerous determinants and conditions. Any concept of ‘creativity’ which denies
this is metaphysical, and cannot be sustained (Wolff 1981: 9).
Bourdieu
would also agree with this proposition. His deep intellectual concern was after
all in pursuit of this one fundamental question. He said himself that ‘all of
my thinking started from this point: how can behaviour be regulated without
being the product of obedience to rules?’ (Bourdieu quoted in Swartz 1997: 95).
He was not alone in this quest.
In his book Central
Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction
in Social Analysis (1979) Anthony
Giddens also attempted to ‘resolve the dispute between determinists, who
believe that human behavior is entirely determined by outside forces, and
voluntarists, who believe that humans possess free will, and can act as they
wish’ (Haralambos & Holbern 1995: 906). In doing so he coined a rather ugly
word, structuration, to indicate the intimate and interdependent relationship
between agency and structure and importantly for this paper associated part of
this with the operation of power in institutional settings.
For Giddens the
constraining and enabling aspects of structure are connected to the sources of
power that operate within institutions.
It can be identified in the rules and resources used by the structure or
institution engaged with. As Haralambos and Holbern (1995) explain rules can be
reproduced or changed by new patterns of interaction since they are procedures
rather than expressly written regulations although they can also change these
as well. Resources have two forms. Allocative resources are the physical things
that have been transformed by human action. Authoritative resources on the
other hand are non-material and result from the action of one individual on the
other. These resources ‘involve the ability to get others to carry out a
person’s wishes, and in this way humans become a resource that other
individuals may be able to use’ (Haralambos & Holbern 1995: 906).
In this way it can be seen that all individuals are not equivalent,
either in institutions or fields. Some individuals within the field will ‘wield
more influence and decision-making power than others’ (McIntyre, 2004a: 180) as
indicated above.
However, despite
individuals using power in this way, as is demonstrable in the studio context,
one cannot simply argue that power is constituted solely within the individual.
Michel Foucault (1980) argues, in a manner similar to Bourdieu, that power is
dependent on the constitution of fields of knowledge and vice versa and it is,
in an echo of Bourdieu’s summation, a productive network which permeates sociocultural
systems. This includes, for our purposes, the system of creativity as outlined
by Csikszentmihalyi. Power in this sense is thus diffuse and, one could claim,
nonlinear in as much as its operation cannot be conceived as simply operating
in a ‘top down’ manner. Power, as used by Giddens, has what he calls a
‘transformative capacity’ and this capacity can be used by agents to enact
change either in things or the actions of other people. This capacity can be
used to ‘exercise power over other people, and so constrain people and reduce
their freedom. At the same time though, power also increases the freedom of
action of the agents who possess it. What restricts one person, enables another
to do more’ (Haralambos & Holbern 1995: 906). In this way Giddens perceives
the complex and diffuse nature of power in a similar way to Michel Foucault. Rather
than seeing the operation of power as primarily negative Foucault insisted
that:
if power were
never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but to say no, do you
really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what
makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a
force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces
pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a
productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as
a negative instance whose function is repression’ (Foucault quoted in Jordan
& Weedon 1995: 479).
The action of power in this diffuse manner accounts
for the way purposeful human action can reproduce and transform structures and
structures can both constrain and enable that action.
5 Conclusion
By
examining power relationships in the studio and setting them against the
conceptions of creativity and cultural production, detailed by both Mihaly
Csiksentmihalyi and Pierre Bourdieu, a comprehensive account of this phenomenon
can be arrived at. There are some remarkable similarities and, of course,
significant differences in these approaches. For example while
Csikszentmihalyi’s use of the term field tends to emphasize its Darwinian
functionality Bourdieu, revealing his Marxist roots, conceives of the field in
a more conflictual way. Despite having differing yet somewhat related ways of
defining culture Csikszentmihalyi’s conception of a non-linear multifactorial system
in operation can be complemented by the differing complex mechanisms that
Bourdieu suggests. It is not that either conception is more complex, rich or
precise in its account of creativity or cultural production but that, despite
their differing antecedents, aspects of these complex approaches are compatible
and complementary in assessing the way power operates.
In
this case the individual will derive a habitus (Bourdieu 1993) from their
personal background (Csikszentmihalyi 1988) through existing inside a cultural domain
and societal field and, in acting inside that habitus, derive and utilise the various
forms of capital suggested by Bourdieu in their interactions with both the
field and domain. It
can be argued therefore that power, as it operates in the recording studio, has
a number of properties. It suffuses the productive networks and the daily
practices of the systems it runs through. It inflects, influences and directs
the nature of the collaboration that occurs within creative groups; in this
case those that consist of musicians, producers, record companies and
technicians.
Finally,
it can be concluded that it is in the interplay between the components of the
system, and the power that each enacts, that creativity in the studio is
produced.
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