Television and political debate

The creative industry inventories commissioned and produced in the UK and elsewhere consistently invoked the practices of both statistics and mapping. We therefore have here a dual appeal to entrenched languages and practices of objectivity and truth. There is now an extensive literature demonstrating that the influence and durability of each of these traditions-one numerical, one visual-has been tied to the presumed neutrality and accuracy of the artifacts they generate (maps on the one hand; samples, deviations, regressions, correlations and so forth on the other). This literature has amply demonstrated the mythical nature of such "neutrality," yet without minimizing or underplaying the material implications of those ingrained assumptions. Cartography and statistics, it has been shown, are both thoroughly social practices, but ones deriving their authority precisely from the active disavowal of such sociality. The work of Brian Harley, Denis Wood and John Pickles has been central to the "deconstructive" historiography of mapping, while Ian Hacking, Ted Porter and Alain Desrosières, among others, have played a similarly influential role in critical writing on statistics and society.

A key lesson of these critical literatures has been that in generating such authoritative and almost transcendental "truth effects" (an often used and highly suggestive term that is heavily influenced by readings of Foucault), cartography and statistics together play a central role in the operation of modern regimes of power: they lubricate and fortify power dynamics by yoking the exercise of power to the production and validation of truth. This argument has been advanced in numerous different contexts, from Timothy Mitchell's influential work on the intricate links between power and knowledge in the colonization of Egypt, to Matthew Hannah's analysis of "governmental" power in late-nineteenth-century America. That statistics and cartography and their actual and metaphorical deployment are linked to the exercise of power is, it seems to me, now widely accepted. Yet Mitchell's work, in particular, goes a step further, by thinking through and elucidating the specific mechanics of this coupling. And it is this aspect of Mitchell's work-his argument that these representative conventions essentially make subjects and objects available to power by "enframing" them, by rendering them separable, visible, discrete and calculable- that I draw on here. My objective is not just to link representation to the exercise of power, then, but to say something tangible about the actual fabric and flow of such power. But it bears explaining first of all why I use the specific notion of enframing. As for Mitchell, the concept underscores, for me, two critical dimensions of the processes and effects in question. These are now explored in turn.

Reality and representation, certainty and constitution In Mitchell's terms, enframing refers to a set of practices that have the effect of forging a seemingly absolute distinction between a "real," objective world and the representations that seek to capture it. His account of the emergence of this separation is a sophisticated and expansive one, but for my purposes Mitchell's key point is this: that in producing objects (maps, data, and so on) in such a way as to emphasize both their accurate mirroring of, but also their ontological distance from, a prior material reality (which they merely represent), enframing practices such as cartography and statistics acquire an extraordinary sense of certainty. We can discern such a certainty, I argue, in the way the findings of the DCMS "Mapping Documents"-their "original" representations of creative economic activity-have subsequently been re-presented. As Kate Oakley has observed, the UK has long since "reached a stage of almost uncritical acceptance of these arguments." Hence, while dissenting voices such as The Guardian may quibble about trifles such as reporting consistency, the central argument about the UK creative industries has been widely and uncritically accepted: namely, that these industries are important, dynamic, growing, and, of course, creative. Thus, in one typical example at the national level, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts confidently reports that the creative industries sector "offers major growth opportunities for the UK economy."

Many other examples of such conviction could be cited at the national level, but it is perhaps more revealing still to look to the regional level. Once again, the seeming certainty about the importance and dynamism of the creative industries is clear. The Northwest Regional Development Agency describes the sector as "dynamic and subject to rapid growth and change"; Scottish Development International says "Scottish companies in the creative media sector are facing a massive potential for growth"; and the South West of England Regional Development Agency sees the creative industries as an "emerging sector" with great "capacity to contribute to the region's competitiveness." What is most surprising and instructive about such declarations of faith is the fact that, as Mark Jayne has shown, the actual achievements of the regional development agencies in the creative industry field have been patchy at best, and certainly provide little evidence for these extravagant assertions. Thus, as Jayne concludes, to claim that the creative industries are important contributors to UK regional economic development "is at best misleading." My argument is that the misplaced certainty, reproduced locally as well as nationally, derives from the distinctive nature of the enframing practices that first mapped such industries in toto. Such certainty is a measure of the extent to which powerful metaphorical geographies can dissemble the material geographies that they purportedly represent. But Mitchell's thesis that the separation of representation from reality is an effect of power has a wider pertinence here.

If it helps to frame the relationship between the DCMS "map" and the industries it describes, and if it helps to explain the apparent certainty of that representation, then it also makes us think about the very idea of the "creative industries" per se. Mitchell says that enframing serves to distinguish "individuals and activities" from "an inert structure" that "preexists them, and contains and gives a framework to their lives"-it distinguishes men in the Egyptian army, in one of his examples, from the military apparatus or "machine" they inhabited and whose structure "orders, contains, and controls them." Mitchell reminds us that this apparatus, of course, "has no independent existence," that its appearance of independence is simply an effect of the way its components are represented, ordered, arrayed. In his more recent work, Mitchell has put this same idea to absorbing use in arguing that as we understand it, the modern "economy," too, derives from such an effect: it is produced through the imagination and organization of a space of pre-existing economic processes, which puts in place a new politics of calculation. I think we can argue that much the same is going on with the state's identification, demarcation and population of the UK's "creative industries." Mapping these industries creates them-as a discrete sector to be endorsed, managed and exploited-in the sense that it gives them form, boundaries and equivalences, and endows them with quantities and performances that can be measured and regulated. It also, as Susan Buck-Morss has argued (again of the "economy"), gives them agency. By differentiating the "creative industries" sector from the myriad participants in that sector, the sector itself can be "seen to act in the world": it grows, it is dynamic, and it contributes to local, regional, national competitiveness. For this to occur, Buck-Morss reminds us, a process of what she calls "representational mapping" is typically required. The "Mapping Document" did not, then, merely provide a description of an already existing, coherent economic sector; more accurately, it constituted that sector by enframing it, or (literally) putting a frame around it-deciding what belonged in the frame, and what did not.

This process of constitution bears close resemblance to the one described by Wendy Larner and Richard Le Heron in their discussion of business practices such as benchmarking and audit, calculative technologies which can be seen to constitute the objects (in their examples, the economic geographies) on which governance operates. A key effect of this constitutive process, where the UK creative industries are concerned, is to give the resulting objects internal equivalence: the industries belong together because they all share the central, defining feature of creativity. And this "bundling" matters precisely because the "fact" of equivalence or homogeneity can subsequently be mobilized to powerful effect in policy arguments.

One example amply demonstrates this. If the creative industries in general increasingly came under the spotlight with Labour taking power in 1997, it is television, of all the industries labelled "creative," that has been the focus of the most intense political debate and policy attention during the decade of Labour administration. This concentration has taken various forms, but it was manifested first of all in a critical consideration of UK television's export trade, specifically within the context of the DCMS's Creative Industries Programme, of which the Mapping Document was the linchpin project. Thus, in mid-1997, the DCMS and the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), in conjunction with a consortium of "private sector investors" (primarily UK television exporters such as BBC Worldwide), commissioned "expert" advisers David Graham and Associates to analyze and report on the UK's television export performance.

Television and political debate

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