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One of the landmark actions of the Labour government that came to power in the UK in 1997 was its more or less immediate identification of the "creative industries" as a critical area of economic growth, as an area in which the UK enjoyed substantive competitive advantage in international markets, and as a focal point for policy development. Much has been written about the rise of the UK creative industries under Labour's benefaction, starting with what is actually meant by the term "creative": numerous potential definitions abound, there never has been (and never will be) consensus as to which activities are included and which are excluded, and while many academics have sought to argue one case or the other, perhaps the more revealing work has questioned why, politically, certain classifications have typically been favored.
Beyond the question of definition, analysis has also been presented on why the creative industries came to assume such a prominence during this period in the UK, why the label "creative" was now preferred to "cultural," the ways in which developments in other countries have mirrored-and in many cases, actively borrowed from-the UK example, how the new script of "creativity" reflected and reproduced wider discourses and practices of neoliberalism, and the question of who benefits from the policy initiatives associated with this shift. But there is, I suggest here, a particularly striking feature of the state emphasis on the creative industries that has not been critically examined: the preoccupation with measurement. This preoccupation has been evident both in the UK and elsewhere. Thus, the UK Labour government's first significant act in relation to the creative industries was to commission the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to produce a study quantifying the size and scope of these industries.
This, the first "Creative Industries Mapping Document" (a second was published in 2001), was described as "the first ever attempt to measure the economic contribution of these industries to the UK." It identified 13 different creative industry "sub-sectors," ranging in size and substance from the "crafts" industries (turning over £400m annually) at one extreme to the "software and computer services" industries (£21bn) at the other.8 Similar quantification initiatives, frequently deploying the same methodology as in the UK (the so-called "Creative Industries Production System"), have since taken place in many other countries, including Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong. In view of the definitional complexities and disagreements alluded to above, "sizing" the creative industries has never been a straightforward, transparent exercise, and commentators have been quick to seize on perceived sleights of hand. "The more the [UK] Government promotes the special role of the creative industries," observed The Guardian in 1999, for instance, "the more vague the definition of what a creative industry is.
At the start of last year Chris Smith [then Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport] had them earning more than £50 billion. By the end of the year the estimate, for the same period, was ‘approaching £60 billion.'" If the accuracy and consistency of measurement have been disputed, however, what has not been questioned is the underlying imperative of measurement (why measure?) or the effects of measurement. The argument in this article is that the measurement exercise and the way it was framed both reflected and in turn enabled the operation of a peculiarly modern form of power. This argument comes in two parts. First, I suggest that the use of the label "map" was anything but neutral. That the document should be regarded as "a map" was consistently stressed by the government: "This is," said Smith, "really a ‘map'-it covers territory never systematically charted by government." Invoking the language of mapping, I argue, called on popular understandings of cartography-its objectivity, its rigor, its detachment-to invoke truth claims in a way that has been shown to be typical of the workings of power in modern Western societies. Second, following the work of Timothy Mitchell, I argue that the mapping or measurement of the creative industries can be seen as a process of "enframing" that effectively ordered those industries up and made them available to enlarged and enhanced powers of discipline.
That another key component of Labour's intervention in the creative industries was the establishment of a new media and communications "super-regulator" (Ofcom) was not, in other words, coincidental. Positioned as an empirical examination of forms of power in one sector of the modern economy, this article is equally, in this respect, a reflection on and application of wider theories of power, most particularly Mitchell's ongoing theorization of power in relation to the experience of modernity.