The discourses of cultural analysis, commentary and policy, even when positioning themselves as impelling fresh approaches, continue to rely on a proliferation of binarised terms and dichotomised frameworks. And after most cultural workers in "developed" economies have come to understand themselves as involved in "creative industries", approaches to industry analysis and policy formation struggle to respond adequately to the horizontalised, inter-implicated sites, relationships, practices and economies involved in cultural production and consumption. This paper highlights the problems inherent in this and suggests an approach to analysing a complex "industry picture" based in some of the principles developed by Deleuze and Guattari. In particular, it explores the usefulness of notions of "smooth" and "striated" spaces, and of understanding the differing processes of "tracing" and "mapping". It attempts to open thinking towards a "pragmatics of context" for industry and policy analysis in the creative sector.
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