Makers, retrieved from http://craphound.com
In Cory Doctorow’s Makers (2009), there is a continual tension between artisanal creativity and business-oriented goals of profit and utility. This tension might be best contextualized in the following antinomy: The urge to create—at least, in its pure state—is not the advancement towards some teleological ends, it is an ends itself it is “l’art pour l’art”—this is the principle of renewal, generation, growth and life—creation is nature. By contrast the urge to generate wealth and create value is pragmatic, scientific, conservative, worldly and based upon causal interactions all directed towards a foreseeable goal—in this way, utilitarian business ethics resemble the function of culture. Nature in an oppositional stance can represent destruction—think of earthquakes, tidal waves, flooding, and predatory animals—but in this destruction also exists the seeds of creation, renewal, regeneration and change. Culture also is capable of being its opposite: frivolity, excess, irrationality, liberality, isolationist and meaningless—but these states too allow for the regeneration of culture via a kind of re-evolution or mirroring effect. Revolution after all, literally means returning to the point of the circle from which the movement began. Where creativity and business meet—in this liminal space between culture and nature—is where we are apt to witness what might best be described as successful ‘economic revolutions’. In Hegelian terminology, thesis (creativity) combines with antithesis (business), creating a harmonized synthesis that enables economic prosperity (for a time).
It might be observed that while this process can be encouraged, it cannot be forced. One here might point out the example of Mao’s calculated ‘Cultural Revolution,’ which in fact achieved none of its intended goals. Or look at the ultimate success of the ‘Five Year Plans’ in Soviet Russia. But the key to stress here is that the process itself must be spontaneous instead of meticulously coordinated—creativity does not operate under the same logic as business plans. Of course, this aspect of creativity is often ignored or improperly understood by those possessing pragmatic, rational business mentalities. Counting beans and growing them are two very different things, and it requires a well-balanced psyche to do both equally well.
In the novel itself, Doctorow opposes business and creative personalities in the physical descriptions of his characters. Landon Kettlewell and Tjan are archetypes of the rational business minded philosophy of pragmatism, practicality and profit. When Doctorow describes their physical appearance they are generally ectomorphic in appearance (with Kettlewell vacillating between a ecto-mesomophic body type at the beginning and a ecto-endomorphic type near the end of the book). Thus in the depiction of his characters the two are descriptively coded as being mind-centered (with Kettlewell being slightly more earthy, and thus more able to come up with more ‘creative’ or innovative business plans). By contrast Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks represent mesomophic and endomorphic body types (until Lester goes through with his ‘Fatkins’ treatment, becoming a full-on mesomorph) respectively, associating them with nature, instinct and creative, self-reflexive potential. In this relation the women characters Suzanne, Hilda, and Eva might represent mediating influences that hold together or reconcile the creative/business dichotomy that exists between these two kinds of ‘Makers’.
Engineers Lester and Perry live in the remains of a gutted Wal-Mart that has been turned in to a junkyard wasteland containing the source material of many of their inventions and creations. In effect they are creating from the destructive consumerist excess of the near past and turning that negation of material into repurposed potential. They take that which served no specific function (for example the Boogie Woogie Elmos) aside from being a collectible object of consumption, and turn it into something else, which though now serves a particular function is not really anything that is commodifiable (the Boogie Woogie Elmo’s combined together can drive a golf-cart around). Their creativity resides in their spirit of play and this is their genius—the ability to repurpose that which originally had no purpose at all. This is the reverse of the Dada impulse of taking found objects and turning them into works of art, here the characters take junk or found objects and give them a limited (or questionable) measure of utility—they thus turn un-use in to use. Their creativity springs from the detritus and waste of popular consumerist culture; they take the garbage of the past and turn it into the garbage of the future, while making it far more interesting in the process.
And yet for others in the novel—specifically Kettlewell and Tjan—being interesting is simply not enough. Things must be made to generate profit and systems must be set up to channel this creative energy in to ways of generating more income and profit. Kettlewell merges Kodak and Duracell creating ‘Kodacell’ in his own words “freeing up the capital” of these two near monopolistic twentieth century relics. This plan involves financing more creative endeavors by talented inventors across the country by using the funds of two obsolete companies to invest in the future. In many ways this also bears parallel resemblance to his subsequent business plan to have investors sue Disney for unfair use of copyright laws, potentially bringing down the company and ultimately freeing up its capital to be used for investing in other areas. Kettlewell seeks to turn the unused potential of monolithic and stagnant companies back into something that moves and generates—something that lives, creates and makes. On a larger scale, Kettlewell’s pragmatic ambitions resemble the simpler process that Lester and Party operate within when they are repurposing their found junk.
The true synthesis between creativity and business happens early in the novel, where Kettlewell announces his plan to use the accumulated capital of ‘Kodacell’ to support the efforts of creative inventor teams across the United States. The shining stars of this “New Work” movement of course, are Lester and Perry. Lester and Parry spend their days tinkering with things, turning useless junk into interesting junk and creating unique works of junk art through the 3D printers they secure from Lester’s former employer, and sell them to collectors on EBay. When Kettlewell sends Tjan to help manage the business side of Lester and Perry’s creative endeavors is when all the elements start to fall in place. Tjan outlines the overall concept of ‘New Work’ (which is actually a term coined much later): “We’re going to create a new class of artisans who can change careers every ten months, inventing new jobs that hadn’t been imagined a year before” (45). His model relies on being the first to create something in a marketplace that consumers want, then after a certain amount of profit is made, quitting that to move on to something else before competition starts to eat away at the profit margin. After Lester and Perry’s security garden gnomes start getting copied and sold for less by other entrepreneurs, Lester gets discouraged and Tjan tells him its all part of the plan: “We got in while the margins were high, made a good return and we’ll get out as the margins drop. That’s not screwing up, that’s doing the right thing. The next time around, we’ll do something more capital intensive and we’ll take out an even higher margin…” (51). The point here is that it was necessary to bring in the business expert to wring some kind of utility out of what Lester and Perry were able to create. Creativity and business need one another to create innovative and successful business ventures, the symbiosis between the two must produce a harmony where both sides must balance the other—creative people need focus from managerial types, while management needs to be affirmed that progress and development are sometimes incompatible with instantaneous (or even immediate) profit.
Much of the ideas Doctorow works out in the novel resonate strongly with Nicholas Garnham’s (2006) article about the industrial and governmental push in the U.K. to consolidate all forms of intellectual and cultural labour under the moniker of “creative industries”. In “From Cultural to Creative Industries,” Garnham suggests that because the U.K.’s proactive business policy shifted in the 1990s from an emphasis on products to a focus on ‘intellectual’ forms of labour, many people who would not have been considered ‘creative’ in any sense before, now would seem to fall under this newly repurposed umbrella terminology. Part of this had to do with the negative connotation the term ‘Cultural Industries’ exuded, owing to the writings of the Frankfurt School thinkers, and part of this was based on the already present trend of corporations combining entertainment companies, high-technology firms, software designers and other business concerns in ever enlarging multinational conglomerates. These developments combined with,
…the general Schumpeterian vision that now underpins much national and European Union economic policy under the “information society” label focused on…innovation systems and national competition for the comparative advantage that successful innovation supposedly creates, it is technological innovation that is the focus and it is entrepreneurs and technologists who are the “creative” drivers. ICTs [information and communications technologies] are the new generation of products and processes that are produced by this innovation process and driving a new long-wave of capitalist growth” (22).
This “Schumpeterian vision” is that whereas traditional capitalist notions of price competition led to economic stability that tended to result in economic stagnation, longer-term progress or “long-wave” growth capitalism depended on competition through innovation (21). This has had much more damaging effect to the notion of ‘creativity’ Garnham argues, in that,
the shift to creative industries has been the attempt to capture the current prestige of this theory of innovation, and the very general concept of “creativity” that accompanies it, for a sector and a group of workers to whom it does not really apply. Even worse, in many cases, advocates of the creative industries approach wish to appropriate for themselves, as “artists”, the attribute of creativity and exclude science and technology” (22).
In an effort to effect policy and paradigm shifts, this new “creative class” would have everyone who generates ideas labeled as ‘artists’. In Doctorow’s novel we see this blurring of distinction where Perry and Lester are the true ‘artists’ of the novel, yet what they accomplish is dependent ‘creatively’ on the writings of Suzanne Church, the business ideas of Tjan and the financing of Landon Kettlewell.
This all ties into Richard Florida’s absurd notion of the “creative class”. This “creative class,” for Florida is:
a fast growing, highly educated, and well-paid segment of the workforce on whose efforts corporate profits and economic growth increasingly depend. Members of the creative class do a variety of work in a wide variety of industries—from technology to entertainment, journalism to finance, high-end manufacturing to the arts. They do not consciously think of themselves as a class. Yet they share a common ethos that values creativity, individuality, difference, and merit (http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0205.florida.html).
What Florida describes here are people who have jobs, more specifically those who work in some kind of service industry, where a cultural product or service is what is produced or provided. Certainly many jobs can have aspects that can be ‘creative’ in connotative senses of the word, but does that ultimately follow that these people are in fact, “creative”? If everyone who has a job is “creative”, who is not “creative”? The unemployed? The homeless? In Doctorow’s novel, Lester and Perry are not technically employed before Kettlewell starts to finance their operation, so it would seem to follow that according to Florida’s definition, the only people who are not “creative” are precisely those who are—the Makers, the doers—those individuals who are truly engaged in free and spontaneous creation.
In many ways Makers presents a fictional way of working out the many contradictions inherent in how our current descriptions and notions of “creativity” are becoming (socially and politically) constructed in these increasingly postmodern times. Throughout the novel, Cory Doctorow recognizes the way these characteristic inconsistencies are being played out within the structure of an increasingly schizophrenic contemporary culture. Much of basis for these new “creative” technological innovations are also ever more increasingly built upon the previous work of others, with result end result being a kind of fragmentary pastiche or collage of meaning and authorship (Jameson 1983). Much of the novel is trying to get at the fact that there are those who are authentically engaging themselves in trying to create new things and bring them forth into the world, and their impulse to do so is genuine. These people, regardless of whether they are working in the annuals of high technology or in some obscure junkyard somewhere, are linked together by a common urge simply to create—they enjoy the process of experimentation, of thesis and antithesis that leads to synthesis. These are the real “risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things,” that Doctorow dedicates his novel to. These are the people channeling the sublimated generative powers given to us by nature.
It is unclear however as to what Doctorow’s position is exactly on those whose sphere of expertise resides in worldly business or cultural concerns, and frequently in the novel he expresses a somewhat ambivalent relationship towards them. They are necessary for the ‘makers’ to realize monetary success from their inventions and advance these developments into the realm of commerce and culture. But more often than not, when they try to be the ‘makers’ themselves (Kettlewell’s ‘investment lawsuit’ against Disney, and Sammy’s scheme to put Disney 3D printers in all the households of America), these business oriented managerial types tend to upset this natural order of culture and nature, creating as much chaos and negative response as possible in their wake. In the computer game Bioshock, visionary tycoon Andrew Ryan rhetorically asks the question, “What is the difference between a man and a parasite?” To which he ostentatiously responds, “A man builds, a parasite asks, ‘Where’s my share?’ A man creates, a parasite says, ‘What will the neighbors think?’ A man invents, a parasite says, ‘Watch out, or you might tread on the toes of God…’ (2007). Doctorow does not go this far—the ‘Makers’ still need the expertise of business management to get things done, with this relationship being symbiotic rather than parasitical. The worldly orientation of Tjan and Kettlewell must be accepted as a necessary evil for the possibility of goal oriented creation to exist in the first place. However just because they are an important component in making meaning out of the creative and innovative work of others, does not make them “creative” in and of themselves. We are not all part of an amorphous and nebulously indeterminate, non-sensical “creative class”—some of us are merely along for the ride. This to me is the real message Doctorow is trying to get across to his readers throughout the book.
Works Cited:
Bioshock. Playstation 3, 2007. 2K Games.
Doctorow, Cory. Makers. New York: Tor Publishing/Tom Doherty Associates, 2009. Print.
Florida, Richard. “The Rise of the Creative Class: Why Cities Without Gays and Rock Bands are Losing the Economic Development Race.” Washington Monthly (May 2002). The Washington Monthly. Web. 5 March 2012. <http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0205.florida.html>.
Garnham, Nicholas. “From Cultural to Creative Industries.” International Journal of Cultural Policy 11.1 (2005): 15-29. Routledge. Web. Retrieved 15 January 2012. < 10.1080/10286630500067606 >.
Jameson, Frederic. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Seattle: Bay Press, 1983. Print.
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