Creativity’s vagueness makes it effective for financialization while hiding utopian potential

Evidence

I conclude Chapter 5 with a discussion of how creativity’s particular wooliness and euphemistic quality is, in fact, its greatest strength: in an age when seemingly all aspects of life are measured, quanti- fied and speculated upon, creativity’s peculiar nebulousness actuality makes it a highly useful discursive formation for financialization. Yet it is also in creativity’s vague and imprecise character that we can find a kernel of utopian negation that might allow us to see beyond our present moment. Creativity, for all its inadequacies, “works” precisely because it bears the haunting trace of the promise of unalienated labour, and so carries encrypted within it, in fragmented form, the seeds of a very different society. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 51

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the core paradox of creativity as a discursive formation — its nebulousness is functionally useful to financialization yet also carries utopian residue.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s goal of bridging to deWaard’s cultural argument about finance colonizing everyday life — creativity rhetoric is one mechanism of that colonization. — connects to: Financialized power conflicts are won by deploying imaginative resources rather than capital; Finance’s utopian promises contain the seed of their own subversion; Markets generate wealth through disposable metaphors, not coherent narratives — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 136 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• The discourse of creativity masks real needs that capitalism cannot actually satisfy #corroborates (0.82) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 572
• Speculative finance dominates by co-opting the generative worker imagination. #corroborates (0.80) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 142