The overall theme of this article concerns the links between power and knowledge in UK state policy on the creative industries. More specifically, I consider the ways in which the exercise of modern power is grounded in the formulation and circulation of geographical knowledges. For, I argue, it was in "geo-graphing" knowledge of the creative industries-in imparting to this knowledge the veracity and immanence associated with cartographic "fact"-that some of the principal disciplinary powers arrayed around these industries could be reordered and reinforced. It should be emphasized at the outset that this geography was, in the most immediate sense, "merely" metaphorical: the "Mapping Document," was assuredly not a "map" in the popular sense of the word, where objects are ordered primarily by relative geographic location. Rather, it was the very designation "map," and all its associated connotations, that mattered. But a key part of this argument is that because the designation "map" so mattered, this automatically and simultaneously makes the metaphor material.
And yet it is important to recognize that there were and are more obviously material geographies at stake here as well. While the DCMS sought to map the UK creative industries specifically at the national level, most of the detailed policy thinking around these industries-and certainly the effects flowing from such policies-have to be understood at a regional or local level precisely because it is at the local level that the policy has been worked out.
That the "UK creative industries" represent a lattice of expressly local phenomena is reflected in the fact that most academic discussion of these industries has been focused on the local scale. One objective of this article, however, is to demonstrate that despite demonstrable regional variance in creative industry agendas and outcomes, "national institutions" and the knowledges they produce do still matter." More specifically, I suggest, the metaphorical geography represented by the "Mapping Document" is interesting and important not only for what it allows (the mobilization and operationalization of power) but for what it potentially disguises or (to use the word favored by Matthew Sparke) "dissembles": the consequential local geographies that shape and make creativity and its content in the first place.
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