Lauren Wetmore <████████████████████████████████ >
To: Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte <████████████████████ >
Cc: Josh Schwebel <privatejosh@gmail.com>
Dear Mariane,
Thank you so much for your patience as Josh and I have been moving through your text over the past weeks. We have talked at great length about how incredibly impressed we are with it – your level of knowledge about the subject matter, willingness to explore it from unexpected angles, and commitment to doing so with rigor is received with so much gratitude. Thank you for bringing all of this to the catalogue!
As you have seen, Josh has made some preliminary notes in the google doc, and we wanted to share this little blurb from him in our correspondence: “As far as further comments, I made most of them in the paper, but I would like to see a clearer articulation of the way that neoliberalism, in its withdrawal of social structures and reorientation on the individual as the unit of (self) governance, isolates the individual worker and coerces them to internalize the success or failure of their creative endeavour. For me, the isolation of the self as the unit of neoliberal creative governance can be made more explicit and might act as a leitmotif through the text…I have to say again though that it is such a wonderfully strong paper that I add my comments only to offer support and to give Marianne further energy and perspective to keep writing.”
I hope it will be helpful if I respond directly to your bullet points:
- I'm having some trouble with the structure... particularly in terms of how cultural policy developments are introduced. There are many threads in the text and, while I tried to connect them throughout, it doesn't quite work yet.
Honestly, the text flows very well for me. Your set up with N.E.Thing Co. is not only a good hook, but also a really critical foil to Josh’s piece that had not occurred to me and is inspired. It also works to introduce a huge amount of context. Shifting immediately into ‘The Employee’ is very smart, and then we are allowed to read the following sections with those two lenses.
- I ran out of mental juice and still need to finalize my analysis of ARCs in two areas: 1) the question of romanticization of ARC artistic autonomy in relation to the value of autonomy of creative labour (culture/commerce dichotomy); 2) the question of the ARC labour model may be recuperated under neoliberal capitalism
I’m really looking forward to reading these!
- The conclusion is missing --- still hoping to discuss the CCA digital funding announcement
And this!
- Notes and references need to be formatted --- I wasn't sure which style you're using in the book.
I will get back to you very soon on this. Once we have decided on the style. For now, please carry on using your preferred style.
- I didn't really describe The Employee as I thought it would be redundant given the rest of the book.
Yes, that is perfectly fine. There will be a large amount of information about the piece throughout the book. Your analysis should take precedence.
I hope that these more general notes can help us move the text forward with ease and collaboration. Once the draft is complete, I would proposed going through it more thoroughly with you. I’m anxious to begin our editorial relationship carefully, given we have not met each other, and I am coming into this publication at a middle stage in its development. Please let me know how you prefer to work – I am open to continuing over email, phone calls or video chat. As you prefer!
Thank you again Mariane, for this rich text.
Sincerely,
Lauren