J ohn Hartley’s

Advanced I

ntroduction to Creative Industries

is a simple but magnificent take on the idea of “creative industries”;it is less an introduction than a pithy synopsis of the author’s life-long thinking on how to make critical inquiries a creative instrument of social change.Born in England and with a career spanning Wales and Australia,Hartley is a key figure in the quest for new approaches to cultural studies in the English-speaking world.He was the founding editor of

The International Journal of Cultural Studies

in 1998 and Dean of the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology from 2000 to 2005.In 2012,he was awarded the title of John Curtin Distinguished Professor at Curtin University.Although in recent history the term “creative industries” was first invoked by Tony Blair’s Labour Party to promote commerce in the arts,Hartley disassociates the term from specific business sectors.Instead,the term is reinterpreted to signify creative ways in which a group of people interpret and transform the semiotic systems in which they are immersed and thus generate new knowledge.The central question guiding Hartley’s study of “creative industries” is how creative changes affecting the entire space of culture—the semiosphere—take place and produce measurable consequences,without bringing exceeding entropy and chaos into it.The idea of the semiosphere comes from Soviet semiotician Yuri Lotman,whose impact saturates the key terms used in the book and the “radical romantic” spirit running through it.Hartley proposes that we think of the semiosphere as a medium that locates and generates the demes (i.e.,interbreeding subpopulations of any species),who collectively make new knowledge through contentions and collaborations with other groups.That is to say,culture is a self-generating,pluralist,creative space that nevertheless needs the help of human agency.As the semiosphere is a global sphere—culture in toto—it can never be “studied” with conventional tools of scholarly inquiry.This may well be where Hartley departs from his spiritual predecessor Lotman.Whereas Lotman retains much of the structuralist commitment of Russian formalism,analyzing the creativity of a text—the minimal semiotic unit modeling the semiosphere—by quantifying the new meanings a text generates,Hartley takes a page from the idea of selforganization that emerged during the Western Enlightenment,focusing on the circular causality linking the creativity of individual cultural products to semiospheric evolution.The methods by which we trace and help occasion change in semiotic systems of different scales is what Hartley referred to as “cultural science” in the 2019 book that he co-authored with economist Jason Potts.In 2018,he gave birth to a new journal

Cultural Science

that endorses an open-access policy to promote free exchange of knowledge on a global scale.

The book has ten chapters that can be roughly divided in two parts.Chapters 1 to 4 lay out the chief terms involved in studies of creative industries.Hartley defines from the outset that “creative industries” produce goods that have a special relation to materiality.As he puts it (quoting Veblen at the end),“what they make is material,albeit in the medium of semiosis:what they make is the stuff by which we orient our individual and collective selves to the ‘exigencies of modern associated life and the mechanical industries’” (3).While tangible goods can also be creative,engendering a demand where there was none,their creativity lies in the changes they bring to the ways in which human experiences and knowledge are shaped on demic as well as semiospheric levels.

The second part of the book (roughly chapters 5 to 10) deals with the question of methodology.If “creative industries” essentially produce systemic change,then we need to figure out how creative moments happen in a complex system.How do we study culture as a system of sub-systems and what does it take to effect systemic changes? Hartley first takes the city,a semiotic system of a manageable scale,as an example.He reminds us that urban life becomes a hub of “creative industries” not because of the concentration of capital and technology.Hartley proposes that we treat all three components of the chain of meaning production(producer–content–consumer) as “creative agents” and evaluate the creativity of a city through an integrated look at the degree to which it achieves connectivity,openness,and diversity.This may already seem complicated enough,but just imagine when the unit of analysis is scaled up.How do we start to examine the conditions for and courses of changes that affect the entire semiosphere?

One key way,as suggested by Hartley,is to borrow from evolution theories.In Chapters Six and Seven,“Clubs to Cosmos” and “All Change,” Hartley suggests we “understand better how big,long-lasting complex systems self-regulate,and how they regulate their environment”(115).Hartley here follows Lotman’s lead in linking the semiosphere and the biosphere,approaching the former as an evolutionary system that replicates its modes of meaning-making while sustaining all kinds of Schumpeterian creative destruction along the way.He emphasizes that we acknowledge different types of change and different rhythms of evolution.A system does not just have one single history,and no change is confined to one person,one locale,or one structure.In an“evolutionary complex system,” (119) change happens at different rates in different spheres of meaning that are coeval and mutually dependent,so we need to examine any single change across a spectrum of sub-systems.Longue-durée perspectives are required to get a full picture of what any local change really means for the system.The invention of plastics,for example,proves profitable in the short term but a wasteful pollutant for the planet in a long run.One may add that epidemics,population shifts,and new technologies of writing are all such changes that may erupt suddenly but take centuries to show their full impact.

The second key point of Hartley’s method of engaging “creative industries” is his emphasis on natural and literary language.Hartley identifies story-telling in a broad sense as the “prototype and ideal type” of the semiosphere,the primary medium of systemic change and core products of“creative industries.” He borrows from quantum physicist Chris Fuchs to argue that story and evidence “both play a creative role in organizing uncertainty” (131).Stories are what give selfreflexivity to groups of people and turn them into demes,though rather than forging unity stories enable “heterogeneous and quarrelsome alliance[s] of difference” (131).The material and yet immaterial goods produced by the diverse players in “creative industries” are all analogous with or linked with stories that shape new demes or sub-populations and new attitudes toward sociability.This argument extends the line of thought that Hartley traces in his 2020 book

How We Use Stories and Why That Matters

,which identifies the telling and interpretations of stories,rather than bounded objects like habit and routines,the center of cultural studies.The premium placed on stories is where Hartley most clearly shows his stripes as a scholar rooted in literary studies.He once studied under Terrence Hawkes,a Shakespearean

enfant terrible

.What Hartley calls “cultural science” is an imprecise science that charts the process in which rivaling and yet mutually complementary interpretations of semiotic systems lead to decisive or“constitutive” moments of cultural transformation.Precisely because Hartley breaks with science’s inclination to objectify everything it studies,he tells us that the precise moment when seismic change takes place can never be predicated,or even recognized immediately after it occurs.As Hartley puts it,“story precedes measurement” (133).Paradigm-changing thought comes first,which then sets off a chain of change managing that can be measured more or less objectively.System thinking,for him,means a cross-breed between evolutionary science and interpretative meaning-making,between an integration of traditional disciplines and an acute understanding of how they clash.This may sound abstract and hard to implement in concrete research projects,but I submit that Hartley is raising a collective research agenda that subverts the very notion of a“project” as a bounded entity.This agenda requires but also elides the agency of individual scholars.It will force the “deme” of scholars in humanities and social sciences to change and evolve.It will take time to observe whether Hartley’s hybrid notion of “cultural science”—a typical instance of semiotic creativity—has long-lasting impact,but I venture that it will.The “new humanities” initiative recently launched in China is a clear sign that Hartley’s idea is part of an emerging global trend in thinking against disciplines and toward systems.

Like Hartley,we are holding our breath for the next “paradigm-changing irruption of new world-views into the global arena” (153).When we can truly see ourselves not as spectators but as chief players in this irruption,then we may have a sure sign that a paradigm-changing moment in the semiosphere has occurred.It is our task now to hasten the advent of the future that no one can predict.It may come after grand destruction,as any evolution brings terrible waste with it,but a“radical romantic” does not give up on the power of the semiosphere to re-organize itself over and over.