As an aspirational ideal, “creativity” has a uniquely insidious siren song: It promises escape from the system that defines it. To be creative is to transcend or recombine the established order, but there’s always the danger of cooptation and appropriation. As Dr. Malcolm, Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park puts it to the park’s CEO, “You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunch box and you’re selling it, and you’re selling it!” But of course they are — why bother with scientific breakthroughs if you are not going to commodify them? Figuring out how to sequence DNA is one thing, but turning that idea into a theme park? That is true creativity.
In Against Creativity, Oli Mould, a lecturer in Human Geography at the University of London, explores this phenomenon of how radical and revolutionary ideas become mere fodder for lunch boxes. Creativity, Mould claims, is often invoked to describe not how ideas break free of capitalism but are made compatible with it. It recasts kinds of labor that may have seemed outside capitalist exploitation — care, emotion, art, design — as the most exploitable form of production. The way creativity is used today, Mould writes, “feeds the notion that the world and everything in it can be monetized.” Accordingly, creativity has become a means to rent, sell, or offer subscriptions to something that was once free or otherwise disconnected from the profit motive. Graffiti artists are hired by real estate firms to bring a safe level of grittiness to a neighborhood. Ebay asks us to choose between passing on a valuable collectable to a relative or finding the highest bidder.
In Mould’s account, capitalism is especially hungry for subcultures — hippies, punks, skaters, etc., not to mention black and queer culture in general — which can be transformed into “vehicles for its proliferation.” These subcultures are mined for new symbols, artifacts, and practices that can be scaled up from regional favorites to international sensations.
This vision of creativity’s close bond with economic growth is epitomized by urban-planning theorist Richard Florida, who has convinced cities and towns to cater to the “creative class” as the central engine of their economic development. One need only install the sorts of converted living spaces, artisanal bars, and totems of tolerance and “authenticity” that “creatives” enjoy and sit back and watch as game developers, interior designers, and small-batch chocolatiers jump-start the local economy.Previously from Real Life:
“Contemporary capitalism,” Mould argues, “has commandeered creativity to ensure its own growth.” As that claim suggests, he believes that creativity pre-existed capitalism and has not always just been a euphemism for economic exploitation. In his view, the word originally signified the generation of something from nothing, or the uniting of two previously separate ideas. But since something truly new or different is unassimilable to capitalism’s techniques for value extraction — economies of scale, interchangeable workers, mass production — much of creativity under capitalism is, as Mould argues, “newness to maintain more of the same,” rather than the development of new ways of being....MORE
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