Being cool is so uncool.

We all carry in us creative potential just waiting to bubble forth, right? This, anyway, is the principal ideological tenet in a time when consumption has become production and personal identity a valuable construction site not only for ourselves but for a variety of culture hucksters, trend analysts, fashion mavens and speculators in the communications industry.

Everyone should have a Facebook account. Everyone should share photos, opinions, observations, status updates. Everyone should Twitter. In the aggregation of real-time opinion, every voice counts. Failing to “tweet” is becoming equivalent to being apathetic when it comes to voting in elections. No one has any reason to feel insignificant; the media apparatus is sophisticated enough to supply the form for all of the content our simply living allows us to generate; it can make broadcasters of us all.

The widespread faith in universal creativity is part of why Richard Florida’s idea of the “creative class” can seem so repellent. Everyone can relate to wanting to be creative, but who wants to be a member of the creative class? The so-called creatives are the ones who reify creativity, subordinate it to capital, discipline it so that it pays and helps in the reproduction of the power structure as it stands. The creative class facilitates the transformation of spontaneous creation into managed innovation, assimilating various potentially revolutionary gestures to the culture and communications industries and neutralizing them, turning them into new signifiers in the game of identity projection. They produce the blandishments, the amelioratives, the  apologies for consumer society. They help ensure that the incentives for creation stay the same: self-promotion, personal fame, money — not a new society.

But the term creative class carries with it the cold truth that some people are more creative  than others, and moreover, their creativity is held to be more socially valuable. It divides and conquers, bearing with it the threat that those who don’t play along will become irrelevant. Like it or not, Florida’s thesis suggests, skate punks and Lolita teens are more economically valuable than drill-press operators or tool-and-die makers. Struggling cities need to turn away from their roots in now moribund manufacturing and begin attracting “creative” people, even though the creativity that matters by this usage is simply entrepreneurial spirit. By these lights, creative people are those who see trends as opportunities, not as idea pollution, planned obsolescence or unnecessary resource destruction.

To operate with that sort of gumption, one needs a network of the right sort of connections who can translate ideas into products, help bring them to market and promote them. One also needs the habitus of success, the comfortable certainty that one will be taken seriously as a matter of course. The gap between imagination and practical action is narrowed by virtue of having the right background, the right mentors, the right sort of access, the right sort of useful friends. And as Florida has made his career explaining, cities allow ambitious people with money to find other ambitious people full of conviction and lets them socialize in the right kind of restaurants and clubs and tastefully appointed domiciles. They can puff each other up with enough trust and nepotistic confidence to launch implausible start-ups together. And together they can fashion a richer culture of social signifiers (the art world, the fashion business, indie culture, the cult of design-iness) that can alienate (and thereby put at a disadvantage) those not fortunate enough to breathe in that rarefied air.

Social capital and cultural capital have zero-sum qualities that encourage those who have it to hoard it.

Creativity thus works as a euphemism for cultural and social capital. And by touting the “creative class” coinage, which elides the personal and sociocultural, Florida helps launder some unpleasant facts about the persistence of class hierarchies in democratic society, making it seem as though inequality and uneven development stem not necessarily from the accumulated injustices of history but from dull lifestyle choices and aesthetic lapses. As this article by Alec MacGillis details, Florida went to struggling, ostensibly uncreative cities across the American rust belt and abroad, providing advice for how they can overcome their lack of creativity and attract the right sort of people to replace the recently jobless working class: “If cities could make themselves appealing to the Web designers, architects, biomedical researchers, and other innovators who are now the drivers of economic growth, then they would also attract the businesses that want these footloose pioneers to work for them.” Cities should be remade in the image of the hipster — preoccupied with tokens of the zeitgeist, hyperconscious of how it presents its ever-shifting identity, and relentlessly self-promoting, though ideally in a subtle, self-effacing way — and thought of in this way. Hence Who’s Your City?, Florida’s 2008 book about how to relocate, in which we are encouraged to think of cities as being as quirky individuals. In the book’s introduction, he writes:

Places differ as much as we do. Some have thriving job markets, others excel at the basics well, like education and safety. Some are better for singles, others for families. Some are more about work, some play. Some lean conservative, others liberal. They all cater to different types, and each has its own personality, its own soul. The different personalities of places seem like hard variables to get a handle on — but it’s not impossible.

But this method of taking cities’ personalities as given can lead one to overlook the history behind a particular urban area’s plight. MacGillis, summing up the view of skeptics of Florida’s argument, notes that

Florida’s embrace of the “new geography” precludes any real grappling with the factors behind the trends he describes — say, the effect of the Chinese currency and lack of a U.S. industrial policy on American manufacturing, or the effect of consolidation in farming and livestock production on shrinking prairie towns.

That’s not to say the advice Florida has offered has been ill-intentioned or necessarily destructive. As Ryan Avent points out, “the man went from city to city encouraging leaders to be gay-friendly, to support artists, to encourage creativity, and to build amenities like bike lanes.” Avent argues that Florida captures the “actual functioning of urban economies” in an era when labor is the most significant scarce business resource. Rejecting MacGillis’s view that Florida’s contention that “Creative people seek out places that draw a lot of creative people” is  tautological, he writes:

Where once, firms would pay high land prices to be near coal deposits or harbors, based on the economic advantages those amenities conferred, they now pay high land prices to be near talent. This yen to concentrate in particular areas has a number of dynamics. Firms want to be near customers and clients. Workers want to be near firms. Firms want to be near workers. Where there are lots of firms and workers, there will also be businesses serving those workers — in business and in the provision of consumption opportunities — and those services attract additional firms and workers. Everyone wants to be where everyone is, and it’s tough for anyone to go somewhere else because somewhere else is where people aren’t. The result is an urban geography that’s very lumpy. People clump together, because there are gains to doing so.

That areas develop economic momentum seems incontestable, but the problem is to assess what is accomplished by associating that momentum with “creatives,” with a particular kind of white-collar knowledge worker, or “talent,” to use Avent’s word. Both Florida and Avent equate “talent” with “human capital,” a term that obscures its basis in the social and cultural capital that are  not merely a matter of an individual’s hard work and education. Social capital and cultural capital have zero-sum qualities that encourage those who have it to hoard it. Not everyone can go to an Ivy League school, or have friends among the children of corporate executives. The “velocity” of innovative ideas generated by a given density of creatives that Florida celebrates, establishes the hierarchy by which the creatives prefer to be judged and provides the leverage  for forcing these hierarchies on the people — the rubes and rustics and outmoded manufacturing types among them — who would otherwise prefer to play by different rules. As long as the fashion cycle is one step ahead of the populace they seek to dominate, as long as creatives succeed it putting this cycle over on outsiders, they “thrive,” because they then get to manufacture the ideas that make them gatekeepers to modern identity.

Creative-class consciousness: immaterial labor and monopoly capital.

It’s no wonder that rust-belt cities often struggle to turn things around. They are bereft of the factories of  human capital, and “creatives” have no incentive to leave their walled gardens. Creative-class cities are places where exorbitant rents and difficult-to-crack job markets are used to protect precious aggregations of human capital, nullifying the hard work outsiders put in honing their skills and the benefits they might have received from their education at non-elite institutions. To these non-creatives, Florida’s prescriptions seem like eviction notices.

In some cities, the non-creatives Florida’s advice targets for de facto dispersal are getting restless. In Der Spiegel Philipp Oehmke reports on the battles over gentrification in Hamburg (via Marginal Revolution), where squatters are issuing manifestos, occupying buildings slated for demolishing, and cars are being set on fire to discourage the influx of “creatives.” Citing activist Christian Schäfer, Oehmke writes, “The city is the capitalist, hungry for profit, while the residents are the workers, exploited for the city’s gain. According to this analysis, artists are the city’s unwilling puppets. As members of the creative class, they move into poorer neighborhoods, inadvertently giving them a trendy image which allow them to be marketed more effectively by the city.”

In the Hamburg manifesto, the signatories attempt to opt out from the burnishing of the city’s brand in the name of preserving affordable housing:

We get the picture: We, the music, DJs, art, film and theatre people, the groovy-little-shop owners and anyone who represents a different quality of life, are supposed to function as a counterpoint to the “city of subterranean parking” (Süddeutsche Zeitung). We are meant to take care of the atmosphere, the aura and leisure quality, without which an urban location has little chance in the global competition. We are welcome. In a way. On the one hand. On the other, the blanket development of urban space means that we — the decoys — are moving out in droves, because it is getting increasingly impossible to afford space here…. As far as we are concerned, everything we do in this city has to to with open spaces, alternative ideas, utopias, with undermining the logic of exploitation and location.

But there is a chance that these very efforts to forestall gentrification will garner the city attention and make it seem even cooler and more attractive to like-minded liberals who want to go somewhere with a passionate, committed scene, where one can pursue “alternative ideas.” And in that way, the trap of lifestyle marketing closes on the would-be Utopians. As Der Spiegel reports on their protest scene, their efforts are transformed into just another of the many creative-class signifiers they want to reject. By using the media to communicate their message — perhaps their movement’s only strategy in the absence of capital or political power — its content is corrupted by the form, which serves everywhere to replicate the dynamic that makes all politics the politics of identity and notoriety seem like everyone’s bottom line. It turns it into spectacle.

In the era of immaterial labor, you can’t conduct a lifestyle based on expressing and displaying personal creativity without attracting predatory capital hoping  to exploit it.

Hamburg’s squatters and old-guard artists seem poised to learn this lesson: you can’t destroy the allure of cool that is destroying the quality of everyday life with a manifesto that depends on its perceived cool for its dissemination. What’s more, in the era of immaterial labor, you can’t conduct a lifestyle based on expressing and displaying personal creativity without attracting predatory capital hoping  to exploit it.

The point is to destroy cool without continuing to exhibit it. But the media is always quick (quicker than ever now, with Web 2.0 tools helping millions contribute) to perform that function — reducing revolutionary intent into harmless preening, making it seem that those involved are posturing for attention — that you too can get in on if you hurry and you can afford it. Vaguely affiliated products come soon after, as the squats are spiffed up for the arrivistes. By siding with the righteous cause, they end up squelching it.

We all want to live in a community that allows us to feel as creative as our culture’s ideology promises us we are. The trick is finding a way to preserve our own standards for creativity that are outside of economics, that can escape the fate of becoming bound up with class, that can be lived without being displayed as a spectacle. Otherwise the hopeful pockets of unreflexive but fulfilling everyday life that we manage to carve out — nodes where anonymity coexists with a pervasive sense of belonging and recognition, where sharing is spontaneous rather than programmed and networked — will continue to be annexed and extinguished. The creative class will descend and force us to question whether we measure up.

Rob would love to hear from you. Drop him a line at horninggenbub [at] gmail [dot] com.

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