Creative-city doctrine gets coopted into capturing worker creativity for capitalist discipline

Evidence

Florida argues that, in the post-industrial global landscape, cities that attract and retain creative individuals enjoy significant economic and social benefits (see Tochterman 2012). If urban policy and funding were directed towards projects that made neighbourhoods attractive to an ever more mobile and cosmopolitan “creative class” of knowledge workers, economic prosperity and corporate investment would follow them, at the same time improving the social and economic climate of the city, promoting citizen engagement and social cohesion. Florida (2012) has noted that efforts to improve creativity must dovetail with liberalist efforts to reduce inequality and regulate corporate powers. Yet Florida’s ideas have generally been taken up in a neoliberal register, helping to reconfigure capitalist labour discipline in ways meant to capture and exploit (indeed, to shape and mould) the creative energies and passions of workers in a digitized age (see Banks 2013; Brouillette 2009). — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 460

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to deWaard’s cultural argument about finance colonizing imagination and everyday life — the creative class rhetoric is a cultural-financial instrument. — connects to: Creative work rhetoric shifted capitalism’s promises even where work stayed mundane — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 441; The rhetoric of creativity masks Marxian exploitation of living labor. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 452; Creative-industries policy funded corporate-sponsored art projects instead of public services — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 460 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• The discourse of creativity masks real needs that capitalism cannot actually satisfy #expands (0.82) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 572
• Rational productivity and social control are welded together in new forms of manipulation #corroborates (0.80) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 551
• Capitalist rationalization attempts to co-opt worker militancy through co-operative management schemes #corroborates (0.78)
• Cognitive capitalism blurs the work-play divide by investing in minds and social relations #expands (0.75) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 366
• Apparent collectivism can conceal pure domination through delegated labor #complicates (0.72)
• Speculative imagination is a generative social force integrated into everyday capitalist life #expands (0.72) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 74