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I DRAW THE LINE AT STRINGING PEARLSChristina HughesPublished online: 19 Nov 2012.
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I DRAW THE LINE AT STRINGING PEARLS
The craftswoman’s imperative and hopeful
economies
Christina Hughes
This paper contributes to developing understandings of strong commitments to particular forms
of work and how they are sustained against bleak, unstable, exploitative and self-exploitative
conditions. It approaches this duality between feeling and structure within the temporal and
relational qualities of hope as they are experienced by women jewellery designer-makers in
Birmingham Jewellery Quarter. The paper locates these hopes in the Craftswoman’s Imperative, a
symbolic good and material practice that is concerned with upholding objective values of the
truth and beauty of artisanship. The paper details how the hopes of these designer-makers
become aligned with those of policy-actors for a reinvigoration of British craftsmanship. It then
explores how hope is upheld, and challenged, through sensory experiences of engaging with the
material world. Finally, the paper explores these designer-makers’ optimistic practices for
achieving the value of the Craftswoman’s Imperative.
KEYWORDS: craft labour; affect; sensory experience
Introduction
To the economically rationalist eye there is something remarkable about the
obsessive attention that is a core characteristic of skilled craft labour. Artisanal workers
spend many hours painstakingly working on an object, often at the cost of an economic
use of their time. In doing so, they can be led to financial and emotional insecurity as they
strive to bring in sufficient income to make a living and achieve aesthetic and artisanal
standards that can be elusive and demanding. Sennett (2008) suggests that the hallmark
of craftsmanship is the desire to do a job well and is the consequence of believing in the
objective, rather than economic, value of production. The imperative is primarily to
disregard profit and create the highest quality work that is possible. Kondo (1994, p. 48)
describes the spirit of artisanal work as one where ‘the complete involvement in creation
should far outweigh any monetary gain’. The rejection of financial cost as the core
determinant of labour activity speaks to elevated values in society that put pecuniary gain
below good work. It also reflects back to us the concerns of nineteenth-century
revolutionary visionaries such as Ruskin, Morris and Marx who argued that such forms
of work are ennobling and humanising (Campbell 2005). That craftsmen are, by and large,
seen to be affirmed rather than denied through their work creates a potential field of
affect in that those who can arrange their working lives within its requirements will have
access to positive experiences including autonomy in work processes, being engaged in
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the production of culturally valued forms of work and the always-potential, if not actual,
pleasure of recognition of the singularity of their work.
Such prospects have to be set within the structural changes and global trends that
shape the material conditions of artisanal waged labour and self-employment. Christo-
pherson (2008) notes the change to craft identities in the US media industry because of
losses of union control and the entry of freelancers with specialised technological skills.
Research on labour processes in the broader cultural sector has noted similar trends where
self-employment, short-term contracting, job insecurity and long hours have become the
norm (Gill & Pratt 2008). Certainly, the fields of creativity, artistry and artisanship are seen
to ooze gratification and those who work in them express deep passion and love of their
work (McRobbie 2002a; Ursell 2006). Yet, there is a duality of experience between that of
being engaged in fulfilling and self-affirming work whilst at the same time experiencing an
insecure economic existence that calls into question the idealisation of the imperatives
outlined by Sennett and Kondo. This brings to the fore the importance of developing
understandings of such strong commitments to particular forms of work and how they are
sustained against bleak, unstable, exploitative and self-exploitative conditions.
This paper approaches this duality between feeling and structure within the
temporal and relational qualities of hope as they are experienced by jewellery designer-
makers in Birmingham Jewellery Quarter (BJQ). Hope has come to prominence as a way in
which we can explore the drives and energies that propel us forward. Hope requires
something of a suspension of the present but it is incorrect to say that it does not affect
the present: it can structure the present to make it palatable, livable and keep us going
when all seems impossible. In this way hope provides a mediational structuring for the
affects that arise when caught within a conundrum of enjoyable work and exploitative and
precarious working conditions. As such hope ‘is not one affect among others for it can
either orient or disorient affects’ (Colebrook 2010, p. 324). In its affective qualities hope is
analytically valuable because of its ‘dynamic and reflexive quality . . . and its ability to act
upon (or affect) action’ (Richard & Rudnyckyj 2009, p. 59).
Nonetheless, it remains important that bodily responses or states of being are not
separated from the materiality of production in the dichotomising tendencies of analysis
that place affect and economy in separate spheres of social action. Account needs to be
taken of the practices that contribute to the affective inequalities that arise from the social
relations of capital and the production of differential outcomes in respect of who has
access to life-affirming experiences at work and who does not, and how work and
economic life is so arranged that such access is maintained. For example, hope’s objects
may require the diminishment of the hopes of others and thereby the diminishment of
those others. In this way, hope is relational not only in how it affects but also in how its
fulfilment affects others.
I begin with an account of the methodological approach upon which this paper is
based and detail the economic challenges that have been facing the jewellery industry. I
then outline the historical and post-colonial displacements associated with global
restructuring that has opened up a space for the middle-class, university-trained women
who form the majority of jewellery designer-makers in BJQ. These craftswomen’s
engagement in new spheres of work aligns with the hopes of those concerned with
the development of cultural policy that seek to teleport the past to the future. This
alignment is harnessed to the symbolic value of the craftswoman’s imperative as a sign of
the reinvigoration of British craftsmanship. It speaks to imperial histories as a way of
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competing with contemporary economic powerhouses in the jewellery industry. In
resurrecting this past, it is unconcerned that this requires the work of others, and perhaps
their personal hopes and dreams, to be cheapened.
Designer-making engages specific and deep sensorial relationships with the material
world which nourish hope as they speak to its truth that it can fulfil desires. In all of the
interviews I undertook, none of the designer-makers wanted to give up their work, come
what may. These are the experiences that Marx, Ruskin and Morris sought to extend to all
labour. However, the attachments that are reinforced through positive sensorial
experiences are also challenged when things do not flow as well as they might. These
interruptions bring to the fore how the costs of designer-making are not those of fine art
from which the notion of struggling for your art takes its cue. They include the purchase of
gold, silver, platinum, precious and semi-precious stones rather than acrylics, oil paint and
canvas. This juxtaposition of positive and negative feelings enables me to draw out the
dilemmas at the heart of the craftswoman’s imperative where jewellery designer-makers
are positioned between its symbolic and prestige values and their economic needs.
One resolution to such economic dilemmas is to develop strong commercial
practices. Such commercialism is, of course, mediated by the craftswoman’s imperative of
objective value that speaks to an absolutist truth and beauty of artisanship. I explore how
the hopes for realising the ideals of this imperative are drawn on in the affective struggle
that is waged with becoming commercial, and profitable. I note that in trying to
circumvent the logic of economy, and retain the sensorial and self-actualising fragments
that feed their passion, designer-makers engage in a range of practices that are optimistic
at best. This optimism has to uphold elitist versions of value as set against the
commercialism of the imported mass jewellery market. This requires the mass-market to
become the realm of the abject and because of this, affective experiences in respect of
earning more than a bare living are those of guilt, avoidance, stress and the potentiality of
shame. In the conclusion, I review the craftswoman’s imperative in terms of the
implications of hope and hopeful practices.
Global Challenges to Jewellery Production and Distribution in the UK
The jewellery sector in the UK has been subject to a number of changes as it has
responded to a downturn in export trade and an upturn in mass-produced imports from
low wage economies such as India, Thailand and Turkey. This can be seen in the growth of
the retail market where the importation of cheaper mass-produced work has captured just
over half of the UK market and where, for example, after Belgium, the UK is the biggest
importer of gems and jewellery from India (MacFarlane et al. 2003). The Signet Group
dominates the retail market with their high-street outlets of H Samuel and Ernest Jones. At
the other end of the market, where mass-production is rejected for prestige, the upmarket
outlets trade on heritage. These include Tiffany and Co, Bvlgari, Chopard, Cartier, Van Cleef
and Arpels and Garrard. The overall size of these markets can be understood in terms of
global league tables for domestic gold jewellery consumption, where the UK stands at
10th place behind India, US, China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and others (Birmingham Assay
Office 2012).
In terms of exports, the UK has faced considerable contraction with only 5% of
production being exported. This can be compared to economies such as Thailand where
around one-third of production is exported. An analysis of gold fabrication of hallmarked
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jewellery puts the UK at 20th place (Birmingham Assay Office 2012). However, BJQ remains
the largest centre of mass jewellery production in the UK and one of the largest centres in
Europe. This is due to processes of flexible specialisation which enabled BJQ to dominate
the market in the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods (Carnivali 2003). Despite
successive downturns in trade, BJQ retains the infrastructure for conducting trade that
relies on complex global and local chains of inter-linked trading relations and layers of sub-
contracting (MacFarlane et al. 2003). Because of these features and its spatial density, it
remains an attractive place to work because all the necessary trades and skills that
designer-makers need remain mostly within walking distance.
Responses to these changing economic fortunes have gestured toward a
resignification of the meaning of British cultural identity and economic prosperity as
located in traditionalised skills in a postmodern fashion age. This can be seen in the
commercialisation of ‘designer-made’ and ‘designer-named’ products such as those
produced by Shaun Leane and Pippa Small or fashion companies such as Burberry and
Vivienne Westwood. The focus here is on branding and relatively small-batch production
that retains something of the cachet of ‘designer- made’. Attempts to reinvigorate BJQ as a
cultural quarter have also drawn on nostalgic images of craftsmen and the presence of
designer-makers is used to uphold this. However, designer-makers in BJQ differentiate
themselves from designer ‘brands’ because they both design and make their work. They
therefore work across the lines of artistry, craft skill and design in ways that are significant
for this paper.
These data are drawn from research undertaken between 2008 and 2010 concerned
with the relationship between the entrepreneurial, aesthetic and artisanal. The research
design included the collection of observational data at a range of cultural/entrepreneurial
events that sought to promote BJQ and the work of designer-makers. These include the
annual Brilliantly Birmingham exhibition organised by Birmingham City Council, invited
Private Views, craft fairs and regular promotions organised through Birmingham Royal
Society of Arts. Documentary sources were collected including flyers, promotional materials
of designer-makers, photographs of their work and of the area and copies of The Hockley
Flyer, the jewellery quarter trade-to-trade magazine. There are around 80 designer-makers
working from BJQ, most of whom are women. Unstructured interviews were conducted
with 15 of these. Respondents were accessed primarily via snowball sampling as this is a
strongly networked community. One respondent became a key informant and we met
several times in her workshop, in a local cafe and at events in the locality. These designer-
makers were at various stages of their professional careers ranging from those who were
still in training to those who had been established for a number of years. Interviews were
also conducted with key staff employed by policy agencies in the area, including Design
Space, an incubation project for those newly entering the trade, and with staff in the
Birmingham City University School of Jewellery.
Displacements in Hopeful Spaces
The designer-maker has emerged within this context of change and restructuring
and in a locale outside the metropolis, but within a city with a strong imperial and
manufacturing past and postcolonial present. They are the new labour that McRobbie
(2002b) draws attention to as recruits to the cultural industries that came to prominence
as a national policy interest associated with Blair’s government. What has been less
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remarked upon in respect of the restructuring that brought new labour into old labour
habitats is how we can understand this in terms of its hopefulness and, indeed, the deceits
and denials of that hope. At the heart of the policy turn to the value of cultural industries
have been hopes for economic revival, renewal, even renaissance. For designer-makers,
hopes are invested in opportunities that may open up or be supported as a result. Hope
affects through its utopian feel and strong positivity and its promise that difficulties can be
overcome. As Colebrook (2010, p. 324) remarks ‘hope can be intoxicating in its capacity to
disorient and to open a world beyond the given, beyond who ‘‘we’’ are’.
These disorienting affects of hope bring together a range of interests for common
purpose even if, ordinarily, this coming together may have been precluded by their
differences. When women’s entry into specific labour markets are causes of celebration
because such women are seen as potential saviours of an area, as these designer-makers
were so welcomed by policy actors in BJQ (Pollard 2004), we might believe this is a happy
confluence in the achievement of the objects of hope of various parties. However,
designer-making rests on antithetical values to the market and, from a policy viewpoint, it
would be foolish to place economic hopes for renewal directly on those whose work
accords with the craftswoman’s imperative that art and artisanship is more important than
money. Nonetheless, this very antinomy to the market enables the hopes of designer-
makers and policy-actors to come together.
From a policy viewpoint, it is the symbolic value of the craftswoman’s imperative
that is important. The main concern is to use this as a mark of how BJQ is a centre of
creative production in the hope that this will draw into the area consumers and more
commercial trades and enterprises that seek to benefit from such association (Author
2011a). Designer-makers’ hopes rest in being able to continue to do the job they love. This
hope can be achieved in a range of ways but it is always set against the fear of engaging in
overly commercial practices that is the discipline of the craftswoman’s imperative. The
point of union between these diverse constituencies is that the craftswoman’s imperative
relies on an antagonism that has to devalue the cultural and economic hopes of others.
This is used as a bulwark against the taint of mass-production from overseas competitors.
How the hopes of these two constituencies came together and became aligned in this way
rests in a history of local and global economic displacements that demonstrate how the
very materiality of hope is essential to its politics.
The context for understanding these relationalities draws on the specific economic
and cultural inheritance that marked the growth of the BJQ in the nineteenth century, its
subsequent demise and the entry, and their associated hopes and commitments, of
designer-makers in what Pollard (2004) aptly remarks has been as a rather regular
repackaging of the area. It has to be understood as a contrast to how artisanal work has a
strong masculine heritage in which the craftsman has stood at the apex of a skilled-based
hierarchy. It is also a field of employment with a strong historical basis in working-class, or
labour aristocracy, consciousness. Yet, the cultural and economic changes brought by
industrialisation included the experience of both upward and downward artisanal
mobility, the latter making it less viable as a sphere of work (Behagg 1990). The
attractiveness of these trades for skilled male workers in Birmingham was further
diminished with the growth of other forms of manufacture, particularly car production,
from the inter-war years onwards. This gave male workers increasing opportunities and up
until the 1960s the West Midlands region had one of the fastest growing economies in
the UK with low unemployment and high wages. By the 1970s, the entrenchment of
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factory-based production in engineering and car production meant that manufacturers in
the jewellery quarter found it hard to recruit.
However, the new labour that women designer-makers represent should not be
read as solely due to the expansion of opportunities arising from men’s exit from this
work. This is no simple replacement of like for like: these are relationships of inequivalence
where one cannot be reduced to the other. With philosophical roots in the nineteenth-
century English Arts and Crafts Movement, the term designer-maker denotes a particular
kind of artisan who emerged in the mid-twentieth century to represent ‘a new breed of
art-school-trained-designer makers with creative aspirations’ (Attfield 2000, p. 46). This
alternative positioning enables designer-makers in BJQ, who have not learnt their skills at
the bench in the traditional way of craftsmanship (Pollard 2004), to straddle alternative
lines of classed prestige. The symbolism of the approaches and histories that designer-
makers brought to the area in the mid 1990s was also entirely fit for the investment of
hopes that respond to economic downturns by retrieving past ideas of colonial superiority
in manufacture and catapulting them to an imagined prosperous future. This backward
and forward jump is captured by how the terms designer and making have been yoked
together to form a new professional identity.
This new identity is heavily invested in the craftswoman’s imperative through the
notion of handmade work. The sign handmade signals its antipathy to mass-production
and is a core element of distinction. The more an artefact is produced by hand, the further
the distance from an abject market. Handmade suggests the prestige and cultural values
of personal connection and uniqueness. It also carries with it something of the archaic that
produces nostalgia. But this distinction not only operates against a generalised market.
Within the global flows of capital, it necessarily diminishes others who may also have their
hopes invested in jewellery production.
Mass importation shapes the backdrop of both policy and designer-maker concerns
for the future of BJQ. There is a resonance of fear of being overwhelmed that is drawn on
by politicians in response to inward migration (Ahmed 2004). This creates an affective
space of fear of literally being swamped by cheap goods and stealing a heritage, that hope
is drawn upon to overcome. These fears are strongly felt by designer-makers in the erosion
of the numbers who work in BJQ such as gem-setters and polishers who have the
necessary skills to support their work. Such losses draw attention to the vulnerability of the
area as a place to keep a workshop and to their own personal exposure to potential failure
when running micro-businesses. For policy-actors, there is the fear of their own job losses
as the area becomes less viable. This fear is directed against those, and the items they
produce, for whom the objects of their hope lie in their own histories, cultures and
economies where trade in jewellery and diamonds predates and supported the
development of the UK industry. It takes little imagination to consider how the doubling
of export value of costume jewellery in India with 205.2R million (5.78 US million) exported
in the period 1996�1997 and 482.8R million (10.21 US million) for the period 2001�2002 is
a good news story for this economy (MacFarlane et al. 2003). As Soni-Sinha (2010)
illustrates, mass jewellery production has provided a sphere for women’s employment in
India and Westwood (2000, p. 859) reports that ‘95 percent of cutters and polishers
worldwide work in the Indian diamond trade’.
Ahmed (2004, p. 130) remarks that when fear is mediated by love, whether this is
love of nation or in this case love for the craftswoman’s imperative, this ‘involves a turning
toward home’. Home becomes a defensive space of collective identification, in the way
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that BJQ has become, and ‘stands in for the individual body and moves on its behalf’
(Ahmed 2004, p. 130). It requires defending as its borders have been crossed and it is this
which creates a diachronic link between globalisation, the entry of these first-world
women designer-makers into the labour force and the alignment of their hopes, optimism
and dreams with those of policy-actors (see also Larner & Molloy 2009). Moreover, this love
is further nurtured on a personal level through a sensorium of practice that produces a
strong sense of fulfilment. This is combined with an almost tyrannical pressure of the
economic that is parlayed through a discourse on time.
In the Sensorium of the Handmade
Wolkowitz (2006) has commented on the paucity of literature on sensory aspects of
working life and notes how surprising this is given that the body at work is a working
body. Certainly within the limited literature that exists on artisanal work this evidences
how the sensory connections that occur produce powerful, and binding, affects. This can
be seen in O’Connor’s (2007, p. 114) comment that working with material objects ‘allows
us to address the generative force of artistic expression without reducing it to a
reproduction of social forces or a chimera of unique subjectivity’. Such a concern has also
been noted by Kondo (1990, p. 230) who suggests that the meaningful aspects of work in
Japanese artisanship provide an important nuance to ‘prevailing teleologies of work in
industrial societies as atomistic, alienating, and divorced from nature and the material
worlds’. However, the erring toward privileging the affective pleasures of such work has to
be understood in terms of the severance of the aesthetic from the economic aspects of
artisanal endeavours where the need to earn a living is ever-present. Pleasure, enjoyment,
euphoria and positivity cannot be isolated from the need to survive economically.
O’Connor describes the sensory experience of artisanship as one of corporeal
revelation in which ‘the material world ‘‘penetrates’’ the actor’ (2006, p. 192). Braithwaite
(2010) illustrates how the dialogue between form, material and designer is shaped by
touch and sight through which creative ideas arise. I have focused on this relationship as
an intra-action where both the designer maker and the material world work on each other
(Author 2011b). Visual acuity is of particular significance for designer-makers and can be
understood in Hockey and Allen-Collinson’s (2009, p. 225) terms as a ‘distinctive ‘‘way of
seeing’’’ (see also Tamboukou 2010). This can be seen in how designer-makers talk about
the beauty of semi-precious stones, for example landscape agates which can be cut and
arranged in such a way as to have the appearance of the natural world, as well as those
stones with excellent refractive properties. In the following extract Janey is taking me
through her design process. She lays some of her work out on her bench, including a
necklace. She tells me how she went about making this and takes out a box of semi-
precious stones. She holds one of the stones up to the light so that I might also see what
she does. It is an andalusite which is commonly pink but can also be found as white, red,
violet or green. Through her moment of ‘wow’ as well as her remarks of pride in the
finished piece, her comments tell us how much satisfaction she gleaned from this work:
So if you look at this [an andalusite] in the light . . . I had to find a style that was going to
pick up the colours in the andalusite and then I found these and wow! So I just put a bigger
andalusite there [pointing to the stone in the necklace] and they pick up the colours and
that’s the thing I actually love. This set is the best thing I made.
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These necessary deep connections between the designer-maker and the material
world are supported by the dexterity and imagination of hand, eye, heart and tool
connections that produce flow in work processes. Flow may be experienced as a period
when there is deep satisfaction of skills, creativity and materials working with
synchronicity. During such periods, this movement through time includes moments of
total absorption when time stops. It was common for designer-makers to describe the
passion for their work that this evinces as ‘addiction’. For Janey, and indeed other
designer-makers, this is particularly remarked upon in their attachment to the gemstones
that are core to their visual pleasures:
I think it is a disease I have. I cannot resist it. It’s an addiction. I just find them so fascinating
and the most incredible thing.
Discourses of addiction embrace ideas of self-enslavement and loss of self-control.
This highlights the strength of these sensory experiences and their importance to
maintaining the will that upholds hope. This is especially the case when the associations
arising from positive sensory experiences are consistently threatened. Zeiger (2008, p. 22)
notes how ‘addiction unfolds as an ironic narrative of self-loss, it requires subjects who have
much to lose � socially, financially and psychologically’. Sedgwick (1990) also notes how
discourses of addiction are tied to the economic body where, for example, the notion of
addiction to opium stood in for concerns arising from imperialist relations and maintaining
the integrity of a nation’s borders. In the personal narratives of designer-makers, the
breaching of borders is a personal threat to losing access to such sensorial pleasures.
The euphoria of flow is easily interrupted when things do not go so well. As self-
employed workers, labour time is one of the most important determinants of cost and it
can take enormous amounts to produce an object of high quality. In one conversation in
the School of Jewellery, Meg was commenting on how she had spent the previous day
working on a brooch and could not get the clasp right. She was annoyed with herself for
spending time that she could never recoup but felt that she could not let the piece go out
without it being of the highest quality that she could achieve. My field notes read:
It seems that the clasp on the brooch wasn’t quite right and it wouldn’t fasten in the way
that Meg wanted it to. What struck me most about this was how she appeared compelled to
keep working at it all day (‘‘I spent all day’’ she said several times) remaking parts and
reworking others, until she got it right. At the same time she was saying how silly she was to
spend all the time it required. She seemed frustrated and annoyed as if there was part of her
that was feeling she was, not quite wasting her time, but that the time somehow was a
waste. When I asked her why she was so willing to put this time in because she didn’t seem
to be very happy about it, she said that she couldn’t let anything go out that wasn’t the best
that she could produce. [March, 2008)
Whilst Meg was not explicit here about the market conditions that led to an inability
to recoup the financial value of her time, Zoe did:
The problem I was up against was that everything I was doing was so time-consuming. How
can I physically make any more than I am doing but I can’t really sell it for more than I am
doing?
What is important to note is that when things do not go smoothly, stresses and
fissures of blocks and obstacles create pinpoint moments for negative feelings of
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despondency and anxiety to assert themselves. Time is no longer suspended in the elation
of hope’s possibilities. Rather the lack of time or things taking too much time highlights
that there is a struggle happening in meeting the imperative of the craftswoman’s ethic.
Zoe refers to this battle with something of extreme necessity as she says, in relation to
having an income, ‘‘I’ve got to’’ three times:
I think that’s where the struggle comes in for us because if I just made exactly what I wanted
I probably can’t make a living so I would have to do something else so if I want to make a
living from it [producing unique pieces] I’ve got to have, although they’re still unique and
designer and everything, I’ve got to have my production. I’ve got to have products I can sell.
These flashpoints of anxiety put the spotlight on the need to earn a living that may
ordinarily be subdued within the pleasurable sensorial experiences of working with the
material world. They highlight how the daily lived experience of many designer-makers is
one of precariousness that requires them to undertake other jobs in order to support
themselves and their businesses and/or to rely on family and partners. This is always with
the hope that their aesthetic creativity will be at such a ‘high’ level that it will eventually
produce enough income to avoid the artistic and professional demise that is heralded in
producing work for mass markets.
The Optimistic Struggle of Hope against Commercialism
I turn now to designer makers’ practices of hope as they are optimistically engaged
with. These include having two lines of work, one of which is more directed toward the
market and the other more bespoke. Such a strategy subjectively isolates their ‘real’ work
from any contaminating effects. It includes adapting work in ways that do not lead to
feeling one is fully losing one’s creative integrity. It also includes the strong hope that their
work will be so recognised that it will bring financial, professional and creative rewards.
What is also important to note is that these ‘mark a possibility that the habits of a history
might not be reproduced’ (Berlant 2010, p. 111). These are those of these women’s
immediate financial dependency on partners and/or the need to work in other jobs, such
as mentoring new recruits to the industry or teaching in the School of Jewellery. They are
the statistical improbabilities of reaching the top of a pyramid, still largely occupied by
men, in a competitive industry that requires the development of aggressive habits. They
may even be related to hopes in their design ethic that imperial proclivities can be
overturned in a postcolonial world. I will argue that these practices are no more than
defensive shields against what is perceived as an abject mass market and are practiced as
personalised responses, even though they form a common repertoire of possibility.
During one of my earliest interviews, Karen spoke at length about the guilt she felt
because her commitment to her business meant that she was still financially dependent
on her husband. The degree of concern that she had about this had led her to talk to a
friend who suggested she makes her work more commercial by diversifying into the
wedding jewellery market. As her friend was certain that money could be made, they went
into business for a while with great hope that this would salvage Karen’s economic
prospects. However, Karen was a reticent partner as she was adamant that she drew ‘the
line at stringing pearls’. To do so would diminish her as this does not require any expertise
or creativity and is associated with mass-market appeal and mass-production methods or
with those who take up craft skills for leisure or supplementary income. Karen worked
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pearls into alternative designs with some aspiration, and investment of energy, optimism,
time and money, that she would be able to cross into a traditional market with
contemporary work. Her business did not work out for reasons that Karen attributed to a
realisation of the limitations of the market for wedding jewellery (here she noted that if
you looked at bridal magazines, the models rarely wore jewellery) as well as that the
market was not ready for her kind of work. She carried on with what she saw as her main
business of designer-making, as well as working another job.
On another occasion, I was told a story of an encounter between one of the
designer-makers who was working as a mentor for new recruits on the incubation project
Design Space and the mentee, Gemma. It seemed that Gemma was not selling her work
and had reached a crisis point in terms of whether she would be able to continue. The
mentor provided various solutions that Gemma adamantly refused. As my field notes
indicate, the final resolution managed to continue to meet Gemma’s creative concerns:
One suggestion that was made to her was that she should consider making pendants as
they have more sales potential than the brooches she specialized in. She could, for example,
translate her design aesthetic from the brooch to the pendant. However, Gemma refused to
do this despite being in very difficult financial straits. This was because, whilst she could
design the main body of the pendant, she could not make the chain. I asked what the
problem was about not making the chain and was told that they are exceptionally complex
forms of manufacture and whilst designer-makers might adapt mass-produced chains by
changes to the fastening, the work involved in chain-making is too time consuming and
complex for most designer-makers to undertake. The chain would not therefore be
handmade. Also, importantly, the other problem was that the chain is visible to the eye
and this functionality would detract from the artistic quality of the pendant itself. A
compromise was reached. Gemma would make earrings because the mechanics of the ear-
pins are hidden. In this case, earrings provide a ‘whisper’ or ‘blush’ of the art without losing
this significance through their functionality being seen. [November 2010]
These two examples illustrate how designer-makers are consistently positioned
between the aesthetic and the commercial as two aspects of the struggle to live a good
life. The real need for income is consistently held against the ‘higher’ ethical value of
artistic creativity in a conflict that can only be won, whichever route is chosen, at great
cost. Whilst the craftswoman’s imperative is a communal ethic, the extent of deviation
from its core values are experienced as personal choice. Meg comments on this daily lived
fight that goes round her head all the time as one that she recognises as illogical in how it
discriminates. Even so, the designer-maker who has gone commercial provokes a scowl of
disapproval that demonstrates how the risk of choosing the wrong side is strongly
disciplined through such community mores:
It’s almost like you’ve got to be struggling for your art . . . It’s bizarre. There’s people . . .who
are really successful in terms of . . . the amount that they’re selling and where they’re selling
and perhaps the size that their business has becom . . .and the fact that they are employing
people and they are perhaps more of a business. And we might perceive their work to be
more commercial but it’s still designed and it’s still good quality design and it’s not
something you would find on the high street but it’s almost like you frown upon it. But then
you think it depends how you measure success doesn’t it really and it depends what you
want and why should it matter if that’s what that person wants but then . . . that’s when you
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question it because I don’t know you question if money has become more important than
the value of what you are doing. It’s a very tricky very tricky thing. I always feel that I’m
battling with it in my head all the time about what I’m doing.
Yet, if the commercial designer-maker is the totem of abjection, her desirable
opposite is that of the prize-winner who produces pieces of ‘museum quality’. Here, the
focus is on jewellery to be collected or exhibited rather than worn. It requires the right
kind of consumer who is educated in the taste of designer-making and believes they are
buying an investment or a prestigious cultural good. The hope is to set short-term gain of
income, where there are the dangers of being seen to have ‘sold out’, against long-term
reward of recognition and singularity, as Zoe indicates:
within yourself it’s kind of like I know I don’t want to cross that line and become more like
being a brand and selling and distributing as much and as widely as I can. It’s almost like I
would rather the more hopefully successful I am I can sell more individual work. More
higher-priced work rather than just producing more. I suppose people who have gone down
that route [mass-production] people [other designer-makers] do have that view of them
[selling out].
Zoe’s desire to produce work for higher-priced markets is supported through the
wider economy of prestige that is validated and endorsed through prizes and exhibitions.
The prize is an institutionalised practice of memorialising and authorising that preserves,
even after death, the significance of an individual as a producer of cultural value. Indeed,
these practices reify the craftswoman’s imperative as a prestigious good. This economy of
prestige is further maintained through exhibitions that operate selective practices on
whose work is included. These include the UK Jewellery Awards, Desire, Dazzle, Collect as
well as city-wide promotional events such as Brilliantly Birmingham and London Jewellery
Week. Being exhibited at these events, and indeed winning prizes, is a desire and a
significant good. Zoe comments on Collect, which is organised by the Crafts Council, as a
particularly aspirational place to have her work because the exhibits are more
experimental or cutting-edge. The Craft Council describes Collect as ‘representing
exceptional work of museum quality’ from a ‘stellar line-up of artists’ and with a ‘loyal
audience of private collectors and museum curators’ (http://www.craftscouncil.org.uk/
collect/, accessed 8.03.12) as Zoe also understands:
I suppose it might be the case that you have certain pieces for a long time eventually you
might sell them but there are places you can show it. Like with Collect . . . it’s a gallery show.
It’s very much more about that kind of work. Like I went this year and there was quite a lot of
purchases made by museums and things for places that are quite expensive and there are
obviously collectors who that’s the kind of work that they’ll buy. It’s at the V&A and galleries
have stands and they will decide what work they take and it tends to be more cutting-edge
work, more avant-garde and more expensive.
Berlant draws attention to the importance of how optimism changes the affective
atmosphere and enables people to survive in the compromised conditions in which they
live. Certainly, the something-will-come-good nature of optimism enables one, at least for
a time, not to be completely worn down by the daily battle to earn a living that exhausts
rather than energises. However, as she also notes, there is a strong normative quality to
affect in that it is insufficient for changing the world. This is the trick of hope in the way
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that Marx talks of the trick of the capitalist. It provides as much as one needs to survive but
laughs behind one’s back because its rewards will always be less than the worth of one’s
hope.
Conclusion
This paper has been concerned to develop understandings of how strong
commitments to work are maintained in the face of unstable and insecure conditions.
This has been a particular puzzle in cultural sector employment that evinces passion and
attachment. I have approached this issue through an examination of the hopes that are
located within the craftswoman’s imperative. I began by indicating how this is a symbolic
good and a material practice that draws together designer-makers and policy-actors in the
achievement of their disparate, yet similar, hopes. For policy-actors, the worth of the
designer-makers lies in their symbolic value as ‘honey-in-the-pot’ to uplift the area and
bring in more commercial enterprises. For designer-makers, their hopes are in finding ways
to keep doing the job they love and achieving singularity in this. Coleman and Ferreday
(2010) suggest that hope both displaces the past and defers the future, as hope’s strong
propelling force mitigates the difficulties of the here and now that come from that past.
Thus, hopes for regeneration of BJQ seek to displace a more recent past in that they have
been concerned with overcoming the downtrends and demoralisation of the past 40
years. However, these hopes also rest in legacies of colonial, and postcolonial, expansion
and more contemporarily in attempts to revive a nationalising sense of glory in a past
where British industrial skills were thought of as pre-eminent. We have to understand the
hope for the new not as a linear progress narrative but as always bringing forward
resonances of past ideas.
We can see this in the alignment of hopes in BJQ against the border threats that
mass-production importation represents where the weapon in this battle is the higher
cultural value of the craftswoman’s imperative. This value draws on a more generalised
view of contamination and alienation that the mass-market brings to goods and people. It
puts objective value ahead of pecuniary value and generosity of spirit against greed, yet it
can only operate on the basis of demeaning others. This may be though the debasement
of those who buy such products who demonstrate their low-class position by having low-
class taste, or it may through debasing the work of others who produce such (inferior)
products. Importantly, this battle relies on fear and it is here we can see how hope
disorients in ways that are not just those of helping us ignore an unpalatable present. In
getting lost in hope, and becoming disoriented by its promises and its consequent smooth
calming of fear, we can be brought together in the continuance of old degradations. This
is the fear of being swamped by the Other, whether that is the working-classes or those of
other nations and cultures. The exchanged values of such a global economy are not those
of equivalence in any terms, be they economic, cultural or symbolic. In such processes of
displacement as found in BJQ of working-class men for middle-class women; of mass-
production for designer-made; and of the puncturing of old notions of centres and
peripheries there remains a diachronic relationality of hierarchy that threads through the
hopes in the craftswoman’s imperative.
Strong commitments to work cannot be sustained without other kinds of nurturing
as hope alone can become something of an empty promise after a while. It is here that the
sensorial experiences of designer-making become important as the core site through
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which the craftswoman’s imperative can be established and maintained. Kondo (1990, p.
241) remarks that the ultimate satisfaction for artisans is to be found in ‘a work aesthetic
celebrating a positive engagement with tools, machines, and nature’. For designer-makers
this is seen through a heightened attention to the visual where gemstones create a
sensory loading of colour and diffracted light. There is a step from intoxication in such
experiences to addiction in how designer-makers reference such attachments and
pleasures. This highlights the strength of sensory experiences in creating compulsion
and obligation. It also points toward a necessary defensiveness in that one has to be so
deeply committed to something to carry on with such work. Zeiger (2008, p. 22)
comments that in the nineteenth-century imagination those who had most to lose
through addiction were white men who were ‘unable to fulfil their social roles as the
engines of modern progress’. As new labour in BJQ, designer-makers are the hope of late-
modern progress. They are a sign through which borders can be (re)established whether
they are those of new gendered fields of practice in older artisanal industries or
resurrecting an imperial pride. But they face a consistent threat of failure as the sensorium
similarly teaches them.
This failure is that of failing to uphold the standards of the craftswoman’s imperative
against an abjected market and to avoid abjection themselves. To avoid these fates they
engage in an optimistic struggle that draws on the potential shame of being seen to have
sold out and, in line with another reading of addiction, becoming a moral hazard. In their
turn to singularity, designer-makers hope to create an ecology of practice yet
paradoxically, the route to this is through the marketised practices that they are
committed to abhor. For example, the prize and gallery system gives value to that which
is commonly thought to be incomparable, unique and non-commodified (Karpick, 2010).
This is through prestige values which enhance economic worth and trade-ability and
through capitalistic practices where designer makers bear all the costs of their production
by requirements to work on sale-or-return bases and/or pay a fee for exhibition. Berlant
comments how optimism becomes cruel when the object you desire prevents you from
flourishing. What is also cruel about the craftswoman’s imperative is its very denial that the
values that it seeks to preserve as a way of preventing the encroachment of commodified
values of the market are already ‘located within the market’ (Karpik 2010, p. 8).
McRobbie (2010) argues that feminist approaches to gender and precarious work
need to focus on these points of tension as they arise from the excessive demands of
contemporary employment in the creative sector. She asks whether there is the potential,
even hope, for new forms of collective action to develop at such points where breakdown
or exit appears the only viable option. Colebrook suggests that, whilst the present is not
the present we may want, even if hope is disappointed it is the risk of intoxication that
gives feminism a future. This paper has demonstrated how hope has been located in what
may be commonly understood as higher objective values of truth and beauty rather than
those of greed and money. Yet when we consider how such hopes sustain and create
particular forms of economy, and how they become attached to particular bodies and
borders, we can see that they are neither innocent nor egalitarian. In holding on to the
hopefulness of hope, there is always a danger of separating it from the very materialities of
its production. Hope propels us toward possibilities and this is why it requires us to
critically examine who they are possibilities for and at what costs. That this is an ordinary
struggle is why these designer-makers are a case in point.
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Christina Hughes is a member of the Department of Sociology and a Pro-Vice-Chancellor at
the University of Warwick. She has longstanding interests in feminist perspectives of
work and education, and feminist methodologies. Her publications include:
Researching Gender (2012, Sage); Feminism Counts: Quantitative Methods and
Researching Gender (2011, with Rachel Cohen, Routledge); Women’s Contemporary
Lives (2002, Routledge) and Key Concepts in Feminist Theory and Research (2002, Sage).
She was founding co-Chair of the Gender and Education Association and is co-Editor
of the International Journal of Social Research Methodology and Associate Editor of
Gender, Work and Organisation. Address: Department of Sociology, University of
Warwick, Coventry, UK. Email: [email protected]
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