Social movement theorists have rarely discussed activism in terms of creativity or labor. Though creativity is sometimes mentioned in its prosaic meaning and the word occasionally appears in titles of books on social movements, rarely is it systematically theorized or critiqued as a conceptual category.8 Jasper’s The Art of Moral Protest comes closest to a sustained conceptual treatment of creativity: the notion of artfulness is a cornerstone of the book’s “cultural” approach to protest, which intends “to increase [the focus on] explanatory factors . . . to concentrate on mechanisms, not grand theories . . . to give the voice back to the protestors we study.”9 Jasper writes: “Protest movements work at the edge of a society’s understanding of itself and its surroundings. Like artists, they take inchoate intuitions and put flesh on them, formulating and elaborating them so that they can be debated. Without them, we would have only the inventions of corporations and state agencies, products and technologies created to enhance efficiency or profitability.” Jasper then concludes: “In order to understand these innovations, we need ‘moral innovators’ too: the artists, religious figures, and protestors who help us understand what we feel about new technologies.”10 By comparing activists to artists, Jasper anchors artfulness in the socio-political realm of activism, valorizing innovation not in its potential for commodification but for its ability to generate political-rhetorical value.11
For Jasper, artfulness refers to “experimental efforts to transmute existing traditions into new creations by problematizing elements that have been taken for granted.”12 Artfulness articulates biography and culture: beginning as individual creativity, it becomes strategic once shaped by a group, and subsequently it is enacted in protest. Examples include deploying widely familiar and emotionally evocative symbols and grafting new meanings onto existing symbols. Language is a primary vehicle through which activists project, manipulate, and redefine symbols. Having elsewhere in the book compared activists to artists, Jasper writes that “at the most extreme, ideologists operate as poets; they define emerging structures of feeling with new terms and images.”13 Invoking the “immense value we place on individual creativity,”14 Jasper employs the notion of “tactical innovation,” a mainstay in the social movements literature, which emerges at “the interplay of protest groups and their opponents.”15
Unlike studies of activism, research on cultural production does not focus on Political aspects of labor.16 But the two are alike in rarely grappling directly with creativity as a central conceptual category.17 One exception is Vicki Mayer’s study of workers in a television set factory in Manaus, Brazil, where the author endeavors to “deconstruct our received notions of creativity and to reconstruct a notion of creative action that is both social and individual in the practices of assembling.”18 Following an argument made by Joas and others that social context is key to understanding creativity, Mayer develops notions of creativity that “conjoin the interiority of mental labor with the exteriority of a world that enables its articulation.”19 In addition to emphasizing creativity’s social dimension, Mayer shows that as a discourse creativity is deployed with discrimination for purposes of social distinction and control. But it is Mayer’s discussion of creativity as a process of making do under structural constraints that is most relevant for my purposes, because it leads to two questions that are central to this chapter. What differences can we discern between deployments of “creativity” in media industries research and the trope of “creative resistance” used to describe some forms of dissent in the Arab uprisings? And how do these differences enable my elaboration of revolutionary creative labor?
“Creativity” is a strategic and discriminatory trope. It is strategic because its selective deployment reflects and perpetuates relations of politico-economic power. It is discriminatory because it is applied according to rules of exclusion and inclusion that serve criteria of social distinction. Considerations of power and distinction in creative labor differ between scholarship on media industries and research on Political forms of labor, such as activism and propaganda. In the television set factory Mayer studied, the discourse of creativity is reserved to operators in higher ranks of the industry, who exclude workers on the assembly line from creativity’s definitional scope. As Miller has shown, proponents of “creativity” have stretched the term to encompass most ways in which any activity that could remotely be described as cultural is monetized.20 In contrast, the creative resistance trope operates primarily according to political and ideological imperatives. Creative resistance refers to propaganda by people we like—in this sense creative resistance is a more glamorous, bottom-up cousin of the great euphemism public diplomacy. During the war between Israel and Lebanon in 2006, Hezbollah launched a range of stylistically bold, visually compelling propaganda videos, some aimed at mobilizing supporters, others psyops clips, many in Hebrew, aimed at demoralizing Israeli soldiers. Though the notion of resistance is central to Hezbollah’s raison d’être, and though many of the videos were rhetorically sophisticated and aesthetically slick, to my knowledge no one called these “creative resistance.” Most mainstream media coverage in the West referred to them as “propaganda,” though in some aspects they resemble revolutionary videos of the Arab uprisings, and some of them even resemble U.S. Army recruitment commercials.
