As a mercurial term that is applied at once broadly (connoting a vast and varied semantic field) and selectively (according to considerations of political power and social distinction), creativity requires definitional work to be analytically useful. In this chapter I am not interested in developing a full-scale analytical parsing of creativity’s various possible definitions and applications. I am, however, keen on discerning differences between the kind of creativity that one sees in, say, a television studio or factory floor—industrial creative labor—and the kind of creativity manifest in revolutionary creative labor. What might some of these differences be?
One must begin with the rather obvious observation that the creative labor of Egyptian, Syrian, and Tunisian revolutionaries is more confrontational than the invisible, sanctioned, unsanctioned, and even subversive types of creativity that Mayer identifies on the Manaus factory floor. Manifestations of creative labor in the Arab uprisings are not flexible, reformist, or merely subversive: spawned under life-threatening conditions, they are radical rejectionist expressions of human affects and aspirations. Rather than trying to find ways to survive or thrive in the factory, revolutionaries seek to burn the factory down, clean the debris, and build a new and utterly different edifice. This is the first and most crucial difference between industrial and revolutionary creative labor.
The centrality of the human body is a second difference between industrial and revolutionary creative labor. Though concern with the body is not vital to most research on media industries, Mayer does grapple with corporeality as an important aspect of workers’ experience, what she calls “the corporeal achievement of assembly,” and she argues that “conditioning the body to do the physical work signified an important rite of passage in the social world of the factory.”21 Assembly workers regiment their bodies in new and uncomfortable ways with the purpose of increasing productivity. Nonetheless, “the corporeality of the act of assembling the television set could not communicate a creative act in itself simply because of its exclusion from the discourse of creativity.”22 In contrast, revolutionary creative labor, I would argue, is more deeply and more intimately entangled with the human body. This is primarily a matter of resources: factory workers are provided with the tools needed to satisfy the demands of capitalist production. Revolutionaries, in contrast, are often bereft of tools and resort to very basic media. The Syrian Masasit Mati collective, which created the famous Top Goon video series lampooning Bashar al-Assad, used paper, wood, and fabric to create finger puppets and human energy to operate the puppets. Using basic materials, they miniaturized the dictator by reducing him to a finger puppet and infantilized him through satire.23 Of course, they also had a basic video camera and eventually set up a YouTube channel, but rather than being provided by “the system,” these resources (most from the seventeenth century, some from the twentieth and twenty-first) were snatched “behind the back” of the dictator to express derision of his person and rejection of his rule.
This brings us to the third divergence. In the television set factory in Manaus, assembly-line workers are subjected to a range of managerial constraints that Mayer groups under Taylorism, “parsing complex jobs into tasks,”24 and Japanization, which consists of a gamut of “social surveillance techniques.”25 Working in tandem and sometimes in contradiction, these two top-down forces constrain workers as they create opportunities to overcome constraints. In Mayer’s words, “Assemblers looked creatively for solutions to stressful limits because they had no other choice. . . . Yet workers’ creativity could also overstep expectations, leading to disciplinary actions, dismissal, or even blacklisting.”26 In contrast, revolutionary creative labor is situated farther down the sanctioned–unsanctioned creativity that Mayer evokes in her analysis. Assembly workers’ creativity is what I would call “making-do” creativity, whereas creative insurgency involves “breaking-bad” creativity.27 The first is conjured up to cope with the system; the second is deployed to topple the system. The first is framed by top-down industrial-managerial models; the second is a bottom-up expression of pent-up repressed subjectivity. The former involves bodily discipline—“The adaptation of her fingers to the fine manipulations of wires was an acquired skill”28—on the factory floor, while the second entails bodily insurrection on a literal and symbolic battlefield. In the first, Mayer points out, “unsanctioned creative actions generally stimulated more rules.”29 Whereas factory workers bent their fingers to the demands of capital, members of Masasit Mati moved puppets’ fingers to utterly reject the Syrian dictatorship. The first is adaptation; the second, rebellion.
Whereas assembly workers face managerial (and social) constraints, Arab creative activists confront often brutal and sometimes murderous repression, which grows increasingly violent as uprisings endure. If Brazilian assembly workers focus their creativity on “eking out a living,”30 Arab revolutionaries deploy creativity for the purpose of eking out a dignity, a political agency. Prerevolutionary creative dissent in countries like Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia—double-entendre parodies, strategically ambivalent artwork, and allegorical theater—can be described as subversive. In contrast, revolutionary creativity is a confrontational, no-holds-barred, high-stakes, high-risk, and potentially high-rewards gambit.
Industrial creative labor and revolutionary creative labor differ in a fourth way. Whereas the former occurs openly, the latter operates surreptitiously. In both cases, the visibility of creative labor is determined by the structural constraints already discussed. Though factory floor workers may engage in micropractices of subversion to improve their lives in the factory, they are subjected to a strong surveillance regime, and the lion’s share of their labor is exceedingly visible to their managers. But if in the factory “absences were treated as the worst infractions,”31 absence from the revolutionary public sphere constitutes an ideal situation for incumbent dictators—presence and visibility invite immediate repression. As a result, though security apparatuses attempt to spy on and capture activists, revolutionary creative labor must occur underground and be physically peripatetic to avoid arrest. In addition to resources, then, revolutionary creative labor’s “trajectories of creative migration,” as Michael Curtin called creative labor’s movement across national boundaries,32 are motivated primarily by the desire to physically stay alive, rather than by economic survival. Many Syrian revolutionary artists now live in Beirut or Berlin, and several prominent Arab uprising activists are political refugees in Europe.
A fifth and final difference between industrial and revolutionary creative labor is that the former is remunerated, however unfairly, while the latter is unwaged labor.33 I list this difference in fifth place rather than earlier in the list because this contrast is not as extreme as it may appear. Though the creative labor of most activists in the Arab uprisings remained unrecognized and unwaged, there have been several exceptions reflecting the commercial and political co-optation of revolutionary creative labor. The Egyptian surgeon turned late-night comedian, Bassem Youssef, the so-called Egyptian Jon Stewart, started his show on YouTube during the Egyptian revolution. In time, one television channel picked up the show, then a bigger channel acquired it, to considerable commercial success and global critical praise. Subsequently, the show was streamed by the Arabic-language channel of the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, before being shut down after the military coup of Abdelfattah El-Sisi in June 2013.34 Youssef, already an affluent medical doctor, was one of a few revolutionary creative laborers who moved from unpaid to highly waged labor. The finger puppeteers of Masasit Mati, in contrast, tried crowdfunding their second season via Kickstarter, and when that effort failed, they received a grant from the Prince Claus Fund in the Netherlands. In effect, they leveraged their fame into financial support and official recognition from prestigious Western institutions, even if technically that does not constitute waged labor. But disagreements within the group led to its dissolution. Despite momentary success, then, revolutionary creative labor’s mainstream prospects are as precarious as revolutionaries’ ambitions for political rule.35
