User:Eleanorg/1.3/Thematic/Reading/Florida

Richard Florida - rise of the creative class http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0205.florida.html

(short article to promote his book of the same name)

• "What a change from my own college days, just a little more than 20 years ago, when students would put on their dressiest clothes and carefully hide any counterculture tendencies to prove that they could fit in with the company. Today, apparently, it's the company trying to fit in with the students."

• "This young man [leaving Pittsburgh for a cooler city] and his lifestyle proclivities represent a profound new force in the economy and life of America. He is a member of what I call the creative class: a fast-growing, highly educated, and well-paid segment of the workforce on whose efforts corporate profits and economic growth increasingly depend."

• "More and more businesses understand that ethos and are making the adaptations necessary to attract and retain creative class employees---everything from relaxed dress codes, flexible schedules, and new work rules in the office to hiring recruiters who throw Frisbees."

How does this shift of power happen? How does it come to be that companies are showing off to their potential employees, rather than vice versa? And just how big is this 'creative class' really? Looking at my peers I see penniless creatives struggling to find work - any work! So this creative class isn't referring to 'artists' in the traditional sense but a rather different group of capital-friendly commodity-makers, who "produce new forms or designs that are readily transferable and broadly useful---such as designing a product that can be widely made, sold and used; coming up with a theorem or strategy that can be applied in many cases; or composing music that can be performed again and again."

Interesting observations about how these people work in fields not necessarily considered 'creative', but importantly, do so in a way which uses independent thinking. An interesting note about shifting class roles is the following: "In fields such as medicine and scientific research, technicians are taking on increased responsibility to interpret their work and make decisions, blurring the old distinction between white-collar work (done by decisionmakers) and blue-collar work (done by those who follow orders)." (If this is the case, then it would be good to know in more detail how Florida works out the population % of people in this 'creative class'. If you can't tell from the job title whether they are in it or not, how do you work out a percentage?)

So is this a kind of middle class, then, who escape the drudgery associated with working class jobs but whose work still benefits those higher up the feeding chain? Young people should be championed by city planners, Florida states bluntly, because "they are workhorses".

• "The University of Chicago sociologist Terry Clark likes to say Chicago developed an innovative political and cultural solution to this issue. Under the second Mayor Daley, the city integrated the members of the creative class into the city's culture and politics by treating them essentially as just another "ethnic group" that needed sufficient space to express its identity."

>> There is something decidedly creepy about this. I guess it reflects the darker side of 'diversity' accomodation more generally; give people just enough space and freedom not to kick up a fuss.

Plug & play communities

• "Places that thrive in today's world tend to be plug-and-play communities where anyone can fit in quickly. These are places where people can find opportunity, build support structures, be themselves, and not get stuck in any one identity. The plug-and-play community is one that somebody can move into and put together a life---or at least a facsimile of a life---in a week."

>> Wow it's exactly like the cyborg manifesto. Only, believe it or not, darker!

• "They [the creative class] favor active, participatory recreation over passive, institutionalized forms. They prefer indigenous street-level culture---a teeming blend of cafes, sidewalk musicians, and small galleries and bistros, where it is hard to draw the line between performers and spectators. They crave stimulation, not escape. They want to pack their time full of dense, high-quality, multidimensional experiences. Seldom has one of my subjects expressed a desire to get away from it all. They want to get into it all, and do it with eyes wide open."

>> It's fascinating to read this analysis against older ones of how you are treated differently in your work time vs leisure time. The situationists talked about how you are humiliated as a worker, then flattered as a consumer. But here we see an inversion where the worker is seen as a potential asset who must be flattered/seduced into employment.

How do those neo-Marxist critiques stand up nowadays then? Does an analysis of the spectacle stretch to accommodate this emphatic anti-spectacle ("they prefer indigenous stree-level culture... not escape"), every bit as capitalist as the one before? Probably. This is a manifesto aimed at city authorities, after all. What Florida describes is the capitalist appropriation of counter-culture par excellence. The tattooed graduate is no drop-out threat to the order of work, but lands the highest paid contract!

Compare: how does this situationist rant measure up to the creative city Florida is describing?
"Docility is no longer ensured by means of priestly magic, it results from a mass of minor hypnoses: news, culture, city planning, advertising, mechanisms of conditioning and suggestion ready to serve any order, established or to come." (Vaneigem's Revolution of Everyday Life, 2006 p.23) The question is whether these street-level entertainments are just another form of hypnosis ready to serve any order?

It's telling perhaps that in Florida's text, the question is - "how do we make creative people serve capital?" rather than, "how do we ensure economics enables creativity?".