-Notes on Critique Creative Industries 1-

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NOTES ON ICW – IMMATERIAL CIVIL WAR - Prototypes of conflict within cognitive capitalism

A REVIVAL OF THE CREATIVE INDUSTRIES

2006, term ‘creative industries’ gets into the European common lexicon, related with discussions regarding other cultural keywords and pos-structures(?!) like ‘network economy’, ‘knowledge economy’, ‘immaterial labor’, ‘general intellect’, ‘course free software’, ‘creative commons’ (…) original definition 1998 stated by Tony Blair: ‘those industries that have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property’ (note the fact that ‘social creativity’ stills is out of this definition) 1944: ‘cultural industry’ as form of ‘mass deception’ 1990 introduction of term ‘cognitive capitalism’ (Negri, Lazzarato, Virno, Marazzi,Berardi) Introduction of term ‘Collective intelligence’ (Levy) 2001 euro may day and connection among precarious workers and cognitive workers (…) creation of the ‘creative commons’ 2002 the trendy concept of ‘creative economy’. A new consciousness is emerging around the ‘creation of meaning’ understood as the creation of value and (consequently) as the creation of conflict

THE MAJORITY OF THE VALUE (AND OF THE CONFLICT)

(…) this is an investigation of the social processes behind creativity, the creative power of collective desire and the political nature of any cognitive product (…) what or who produces value? The social factory produces the greatest portion of value (…) political space of cognitive competition (…) public life of immaterial objects (…) the grey zone created by the ‘massification of the creative attitude ‘everyone is creative’ (…) creative industries face the entropy of meaning and producers (…) (…) political agenda for creative industries (…) creative commons (…) guarantee minimum income (…) Renzo Rullani (‘cognitive capitalism’) suggests that we focus on the autonomous power of producers, rather than on the dimension of dependent labor. Plea for a ‘disambiguation’ of political views around creative industries; this essay aims to focus on the collective production of value and the strong competition cognitive producers face in the ‘immaterial domain’

LAZZARATO READING TRADE: THE PUBLIC DIMENSION OF VALUE

Contemporary criticism dominated by metaphors without any notion of value and valorization (…) I want to introduce (…) a more dynamic scenario (…) on how value is produced by an accumulation of social desire and collective imitation. Tarde’s philosophy challenging the premises of the issue: dissolves the opposition of material and immaterial labor (brain collaboration as traditional main force); innovation as driving force of capitalism (not money accumulation); value based on a multitude of types: use value, truth value, beauty value (…) Lazzarato on Tarde’s philosophy: an invention that is not imitated is not socially existent: to be imitated an invention needs to draw attention, to produce a force of mental attraction on other brains, to mobilize their desires and beliefs through a process of social communication (…) immaterial objects (…) imitation and innovation – darwinistic environment.

ENZO RULLANI ANDTHE ‘LAW OF DIFFUSION’

Cognitive valorization, more than knowledge sharing (…) how much value knowledge produces (…) the value of knowledge is multiplied by its diffusion (…) we have to learn how to manage this kind of circulation (…) knowledge produces value if its adopted and the adoption creates interdependency (proprietary logic is no longer based on object and space, but speed and time (…) management of knowledge value: control on diffusion, speed, control on contextual characteristics, control on network alliances (idea, value in a dynamic environment where it gets to be constantly challenged (…) when everything can be duplicated everywhere, time becomes more important than space (…) release part of work as teaser an leave the rest private (…) collective accumulation of value is tangible and visible, as oppose to the individual one

DAVID HARVEY AND COLLECTIVE SYMBOLIC CAPITAL

Harvey: tracking the parasitic exploitation of the immaterial domain by the material one (…) Barcelona, international brand, real estate speculation, culture, tradition, location, cultural, educational and artistic offer, architecture (…) capitalism is always looking for marks of distinction (…) the limits of dissemination to gather value in three parts: 1-control of dissemination, excessive dissemination turns out a distinction mark into a mass product; 2-setting up of monopolies, blocking the flow, appears to be the only way to guarantee rent over inflated value; 3-global capital actually feeds local resistance to promote a mark of distinction (…) “the most avid globalisers will support local developments that have the potential to yield monopoly rents even if the effect of such support is to produce a local political climate antagonistic to globalization” Concept of collective symbolic capital (Pierre Bourdieu) to explain how culture is exploited by capitalism; the layer of cultural production attached to a specific territory produces a fertile habitat for monopoly rents and the better terrain for that is a “field of historically constituted cultural artefacts and practices and special environment characteristics (…) obvious example contemporary tourism (…) “the brand of Barcelona is a consensual hallucination produced by many but exploited by few (…) the creative workers produce symbolic value for the real estate economy that perpetually squeezes them (…) the so called creative class is nothing but a simulacrum of collective symbolic capital to raise the marks of distinction of a given city (…) it is an anthropomorphic brand (…) the creative class is a parasitic simulacrum of social creativity detached from the precariat and attached to the elite class (…) why let the monopoly rent attached to that symbolic capital be captured only by the multinationals or by a small powerful segment of the local bourgeoisie (…) how can these cultural interventions themselves become a weapon of class struggle? How to develop a resistance that cannot be exploited as another mark of distinction?

ICW – IMMATERIAL CIVIL WAR

Immaterial civil-war: conflicts within cognitive capitalism have no clear class and composition and share the same media space (…) cooperation is structurally difficult among creative workers, where a prestige economy operates the same way as ant star system and where new idea have to confront each other (…)

FACING THE PARASITE

(…) a good form of resistance could be an assault on the myth of creative city rather than a “want-to-be-radical” reactions that will just make it more exclusive (…) people should find ways to reclaim the economical surplus exploited by few speculators = renegotiation of collective symbolic capital (…) creative workers should start to recognize he surplus value of imagery they produce beyond their immaterial objects and all the remote political repercussions of any sign (…) we are waiting for a generation of cognitive workers able to mobilize out of the imagery

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NOTES ON THE MURDER OF CREATIVITY IN ROTTERDAM

ROTTERDAM THE NEXT CREATIVE CAPITAL OF THE NETHERLANDS

Attempts to win the title the creative capital of the Netherlands (…) essay on two housing developments in Rotterdam: the poetic Freedom in Spange and the Lloyds Kwartier (…) exploitation of creativity by city developers (…) so this is a plead to creative agents to act un-creatively (…) tough for Rotterdam (…) big neighbor Amsterdam (..) popular image of Rotterdam as a no non-sense working class city (…) in line with the narrative about how Rotterdam got out of the ashes after the WWII (…) sublime chance to do it all over again (…) Crimson Architectural Historians (…) negative correlation between the working class nature of the city and the bohemian climate associated with creativity (…) high concentration of industrial workers, very hard de- industrialization process leading to social unrest; fertile ground for populist parties. No expense or effort spared to attract creative people and keep them in the city (…) desperate attempts to avoid further influx of non-creative people, like the Rotterdam Law (research on). Simultaneously, non creative people got kicked away from locations with high potential for creative’s and entrepreneurs and spread throughout the city (…) O Rotterdam didn’t wait for creativity to grow naturally out of its interstices; Rotterdam manufactures it.

FROM TOTAL CREATIVE ENVIRONMENTS (THE LLOYD KWARTIER)

This development anticipates the expected arrival of the creative class; it’s a ‘breeding place where creative’s can cooperate’ (…) common working places are in the end no more than regular office units, all under one roof and one label, like the BINK and the CREATIVE FACTORY (…) the plan is not meant for artists, designers or musicians, once they wouldn’t be able to afford it; creativity here becomes only a label that yuppies, managers and so on like to refer to as life style. It becomes a mark of authenticity and distinction (…) the purpose of the plan is to attract entrepreneurial people to a depressed and segregated area, but it actually failed to do so until now, once there is no integration between this sort of gated community and the surrounding area. The fact that the strategy, from content to form (creative docklands typology), is a copy paste from other solutions in many other harbor cities, places Rotterdam in a pretty hard inter-urban competition

TO GENTRIPUNCTURE (THE POETIC FREEDOM)

Critical discourse against big developments like the Lloyds Kwartier tends to push the attention away from exploitation of creativity itself and to focus on the big scale of the plan and its speculative nature (…) we should be aware of other plans, seen as ‘more authentic’, in which creativity plays a similar labeling role (…) the ‘Poetic Freedom’ offered for free a dilapidated building in Spangen to anyone who would commit to re-design and re-build it, within a communal effort, keep it for at least two years and engage deeply with the local community; Spangen is a very problematic neighborhood, with a lot of unemployment and high criminality rate (…) only the creative middle class was willing to engage in the adventure (…) but, the collective initiative only masks the will for individual ownership and the community apparently stays in a state of island mentality and exclusivity regarding the neighborhood; there is no actual integration and no actual positive consequence for the impoverished surroundings (…) the whole initiative was broadly subsidized by the government and brought no particular public advantage (…) the creative class is paying also a far too high price for a freedom that happens to be fake; the city is imprisoning them within certain convenient borders in exchange for a bit of living stability instead of helping them out on their usual precarious working conditions.

THE HIGH COST OF POETIC FREEDOM

The role of family under capitalism: deliver disciplined and productive subjects (…) family functions as a safety net when something goes wrong with the individual (…) “family is caught in a double exploitation scheme, it assumes the costs for services that the society and the market are not willing to pay for, while clearly benefiting from them” (…) we can see this safety net provided by the family as playing a similar role to that of the creative networks (…) precarious work leads to dependency upon family, friends and creative co-workers in order to get commissions and be able to overcome major financial problems (…) the ‘Poetic freedom’ plan looks like a good example of this sponsoring of a helping network (…) (…) “one should learn how to not be creative. It is only by a friendly, organized refusal of its manipulated role as creative avant-garde that the cultural sector can safeguard its most precious asset – its creativity – from being the object of perverse politico-economical games” (…)