Neoliberals dressed in black; or, the traffic in creativity.

Szeman, Imre

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

Karl Marx

The German Ideology

It is now impossible to tell an espresso-sipping artist from a cappuccino-gulping banker.

David Brooks

Bobos in Paradise

WITH THE PUBLICATION OF The Rise of the Creative Class (RCC) in 2002, Richard Florida became almost instantly an influential figure across a range of fields and disciplines. An academic by training, over the past decade Florida has advanced ideas that have shaped discussions of current affairs and the decisions made by businesses and governments. Although he did not invent the term "Creative Class," his thorough analysis and description of the characteristics and function of what he sees as this newly hegemonic socio-economic group guaranteed that he would be identified as its progenitor and primary spokesperson. Florida has remained a staunch defender and advocate of the Creative Class and its related concepts (creative cities and creative economies) over a series of follow-up books that answer criticisms and provide further nuance to the central ideas developed in RCC (2); for him, the financial crash only further confirms the need to place creativity at the centre of how we imagine the economy. (3) Nevertheless, it is the first book that remains the most significant, in terms of the articulation of the concepts and ideas he continues to advance, the attention and criticism it has generated, and its lasting impact on the language in which contemporary economic and urban planning decisions are framed.

In Canada, Florida's ideas have generated more praise than criticism, more acceptance than dismissal. His appointment in 2007 at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management as Professor of Business and Creativity, and as Academic Director of the newly established Prosperity Institute, was celebrated by local and national media alike. Here was an example of just the kind of Creative Class migration that Florida himself wrote about, with the bonus being that his move from Washington dc to Toronto seemed to confirm the latter's growing importance as a creative city. Even before his physical arrival in Canada, the discourse of creative cities had been taken up fervently by city governments anxious to find an urban planning narrative to match the challenges and expectations of a neoliberal age. If organizations such as the Creative City Network of Canada (CCNC) or the series of Creative Places + Spaces conferences organized by the non-profit group Artscape are any indication, the idea that creativity is essential to economic growth has been swallowed whole by urban governments across Canada--in big cities such as Vancouver and Montreal, but also in smaller places from Moncton, New Brunswick, to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan (4); the Canada Excellence Research Chairs program to bring highly coveted scientific and medical researchers to Canada suggests that the federal government also believes in the economic impact of innovation and creativity. For artists and arts and cultural groups, this attention to the material conditions of creativity might not seem to be a problem. In an effort to create urban environs attractive to members of the Creative Class, local, regional, and national governments have created new programs to support and encourage culture. Instead of being a drain on economies, around the world the arts and culture sector is now seen as a potential financial boon: a segment of the economy in which it is necessary to invest given its overall fiscal impact. (5)

Is there anything wrong with this interest in the economic spinoffs of creativity? Even if only strategically--focusing on the outcome as opposed to the concepts, arguments, and theories employed by Florida and others championing creativity today--doesn't this development represent a productive and positive situation for the arts and culture in Canada (and everywhere else)? If the language of creative cities and the creative class generates more money for museums, increases in grants for artists, expansion of government sponsorship of festivals, support for humanities research on campuses, and so on, what could possibly be wrong with it? I want to argue that the redefinition of culture as an economic resource and as one creative practice amongst many making up the twenty-first century economy is a problem. It is not a gain for arts and culture; as recent (2009) cuts to arts and culture funding in both Alberta and British Columbia suggest, the arts continue to be seen as (unfortunately) amongst the least essential elements of public and social life. But beyond such facts, the expansion of discourses of creativity into the economy at large represents a loss in how we understand the politics of culture--a shift from a practice with a certain degree of autonomy (however questionable, however problematic at a theoretical level) to one without any. In what follows, I offer a detailed analysis of Florida's RCC to show what work his discourse of creativity does in relation to the arts and culture. There have now been numerous criticisms made of Florida's ideas, primarily by urban geographers and economists who question his claims about the precise character of Creative Class and the spaces they inhabit. What has not been addressed directly is the very idea of "creativity" on which it all hinges--a concept that has been increasingly called upon to do important conceptual and political work on both right and left.

As is to be expected from a contemporary popular non-fiction text addressing social issues (indeed, it is fundamental to the genre), the core promise and attraction of Florida's RCC is its presentation of a new social phenomenon that its author has uncovered; the significance of this phenomenon is figured as being essential to an understanding of the nature of contemporary society, as well as its coming future. The rhetorical form of the book is that of the explorer's tale--the breathless recounting of the discovery of a paradigm shift that reorganizes our very sense of the operations of the social world. Though few others may have grasped it, Florida aims to convince us that the Creative Class is the one primarily responsible for the bulk of economic development today and that its influence on and importance for the economy will only grow in the coming decades. The emphasis on a specific class in relation to its economic function is significant. While Florida presumes to offer a wide-ranging analysis of contemporary society--he positions himself as heir to the work of sociologists such as William H. Whyte, C. Wright Mills, and Jane Jacobs--at its heart this is a labour management book. In the context of a variety of social changes and developments, especially the coming-to-be of the technological society, RCC analyzes the characteristics of the Creative Class--their motivations, pleasures, habits, tendencies, goals, likes, and dislikes--in order to give companies the conceptual tools with which they might better capture the fruits of their employees' creativity. It is also a book designed to offer economic advice to city councils and urban planners. (6) Florida makes it abundantly clear that it is not enough to change the work environment of the Creative Class to improve the bottom line. The energies of the Creative Class can be harnessed only in urban environments in which this class finds it appealing to live. The book offers guidelines for the character and nature of the cultural amenities and urban characteristics that provide the preconditions for the creativity so essential to economies today.

It is this aspect of the book that has received most of the critical and media attention directed Florida's way. The long fourth section, "Community," offers an account of what constitutes Creative Centers ("the economic winners of our age" [218]) and an overview of the various statistical procedures he and his colleagues have used to map out the new urban geography of class in the United States. (7) Florida explores the logic of the growing gap between those cities with large numbers of the Creative Class and those without; this division correlates directly with the current financial status of the cities in question. The main question that organizes his examination of urban economics is why members of the Creative Class choose to live in some cities more than in others. A clarification of which characteristics make those cities high on the creative cities index--San Francisco, Austin, Seattle, Boston--so attractive to the Creative Class is intended to assist those at the bottom of the list--Memphis, Norfolk, Buffalo, Louisville--to develop programs and policies to improve their economies.

One can understand why criticism might be directed here. First, local media seized on Florida's book to either trumpet the standing of their cities or dispute it. (Are Buffalo or Memphis really such terrible places to live? Can such places really make themselves attractive to software engineers and financiers?) Second, challenges were made to veracity and utility of the new indices Florida used to generate his rankings. In addition to indices such as innovation (measured by patents per capita) and high-tech ranking (the Milken Institute's Tech Pole Index), he also made use of two even more controversial measurements: the Gay index and the Bohemian index. It is the politics many felt to be hidden in these measures that produced controversy. For Florida, the Gay index--the number of gay people in a city or a region--indicates a region's tolerance, while the Bohemian index--"the number of writers, designers, musicians, actors and directors, painters and sculptors, photographers and dancers" (260)--identifies the cultural amenities in a region--less such things, it should be noted, as symphonies and concert halls (for which there are other indices) and more the cutting-edge, indie vibe of a place. (8) What do these factors have to do with urban economies? Florida claims that "artists, musicians, gay people and the members of the Creative Class in general prefer places that are open and diverse" (250). He identifies a high correlation between these various indexes, the numbers of Creative Class in an area, and economic success. For reasons that will become clear momentarily, members of the Creative Class are thought to value lifestyle, social interaction, diversity, authenticity, identity. Florida proposes the theory that "regional economic growth is powered by creative people, who prefer places that are diverse, tolerant and open to ideas" (249). Cities didn't like being deemed uncool (Memphis, Detroit) or intolerant (St Louis and poor Memphis again); further, the breakdown of creative cities as opposed to uncreative ones along party lines--with creative cities tending to be blue (Democrat) and uncreative ones red (Republican)--made many on the U.S. right suspicious of the real intentions of Florida's study.

The claims and arguments made in the latter part of Florida's book about the relationship between cities and creativity have generated criticism; the earlier, more substantive part far less so. The first three sections--"The Creative Age" "Work" and "Life and Leisure"--offer a detailed examination of the character of the Creative Class. It is here, in other words, that he identifies what makes this class meaningfully a class at all. As the preferences for tolerance, diversity, and openness to ideas already named above might suggest, this is not a class in any objective sense of the term, whether understood in the terms of classical economics (the division of the social world into quartiles or quintiles based on income) or in the Marxist sense of those who sell their labour as opposed to those who purchase it. The Creative Class is first and foremost treated as an economic class. It is an economic class that is brought together, however, not just by the fact that its members occupy certain professions but because they adopt a common style de vie, an outlook on life that cuts across and ties together the different registers of work, leisure, self-actualization, and social goods. If one had to capture this mode of being in a word, it is in the adjective that Florida gives to this class: creative. One might then expect a clear definition--even an attempt at one--given the very looseness and indefiniteness of the social meaning of the term, which can at times act as little more than an empty approbative: to label something creative is to offer approval or praise. Startlingly, none is given. Nevertheless, there is a core significance and function for "creative" (adjective) and "creativity" (noun) that emerges in Florida's book. To understand the work that the concept of creativity does for his understanding of the social--and indeed, the work it does more generally today, outside of Florida's book as much as within it--one has to consider the significance of the multiple identifications and associations he proposes for the term throughout the book.

Even though many of Florida's descriptions of creativity appear to operate in the same register (that is, they point to the same noun, the same thing, even if they do so with slight variations), looking at the claims and assumptions made in each case is essential. There are (at least) seven forms or modes of creativity identified in RCC:

(a) Creativity is an innate characteristic of the human mind or brain. "The creative impulse--the attribute that distinguishes us as humans from other species" (4). It is an attribute that distinguishes the human as such, although it is also described as "a capacity inherent to varying degrees in virtually all people" (31).

(b) It is a cultural or social characteristic and/or good. Just as with individuals, societies can be more or less creative or can be organized to be conducive to creativity or to limit or prohibit it. The text stands as a warning to the U.S. to be careful about losing its creative edge to countries such as the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands, which are doing a better job of being creative.

(c) Creativity is the subversion or breaking of rules: "It disrupts existing patterns of thought and life. It can feel subversive and unsettling even to the creator. One famous definition of creativity is 'the process of destroying one's gestalt in favor of a better one'" (32). (9) Creativity as subversion is especially important in Florida's re-narration of the social drama of the 1960s and its central place in the constitution of the ethos of Silicon Valley (190-211, especially 202-10) and in technological industries more generally.

(d) It constitutes the key element of certain kinds of work, which cuts across the spectrum of previous definitions and distinctions of labour, that is, white collar, blue collar, executive class, working class. There can be white-collar creative jobs just as there can be blue-collar ones, which is why for Florida it is better to speak of a Creative Class instead of depending on these older, Fordist categories. Creative jobs are challenging and involve problem solving. There is an innate pleasure to this kind of work--it wouldn't even be work except for the fact that you are paid (bonus!). Creative people are attracted to their jobs because of "intrinsic rewards ... tied to the very creative content of their work" (87). Such work allows one to exercise the innate impulse identified in (a).

(e) Creativity is used as a stand-in term for acts that produce the "new": new ideas, new concepts, or new products. In other words, novelty is creativity (and vice versa).

(f) Creativity is strongly linked to technology. One measure of creativity is the number of patents issued per capita; another is the amount of spending on research and development. Florida identifies Nokia cellphones and the film series The Lord of the Rings as "creative products." Although he identifies other fields of endeavour and other products as "creative" there is no doubt that he sees the field of contemporary high technology as a place where it is especially in force.

(g) Finally, creativity is repeatedly identified as a characteristic of work in the arts--work done by those whose activities are named by the Bohemian index. This is an element of the arts that has now expanded to cover other forms of human endeavour as a result of social change, technological development, or simply insight into the productive process: in hindsight, many forms of work were always already creative: "Writing a book, producing a work of art or developing new software requires long periods of concentration" (14). When creativity is described by Florida, the arts are always in the pole position: "[Prosperity] requires increasing investments in the multidimensional and varied forms of creativity--arts, music, culture, design and related fields--because all are linked and flourish together" (320).

At times these varied appeals to creativity stand alone; more often, creativity is described and discussed by linking two or more of these different ideas of creativity together. The chain of associations through which Florida runs these works something like this:

   technology (f) is creative because
   it is full of people who are allowed to be subversive (c) and so
   create new things (e),
   all as a result of a new social setting (b)
   that enables companies to (d) create working conditions to
   permit this to happen.

Working in a high-tech company and being able to be creative in this fashion is the best of all possible worlds but is nonetheless at heart: (a) an expression of an innate human impulse which the economic world has hitherto squashed underfoot.

Unsurprisingly, the circulation of these multiple ideas of creativity generates an increasing number of tautologies and inconsistencies as the book progresses. "Creativity ... is an essential part of everyone's humanity that needs to be cultivated" (317), and yet we are also repeatedly told that there are "creative people" (and so presumably less creative ones, too) and a distinct class whose creativity must therefore be the function of something other than simply being human.

The seventh definition of creativity (g) is without question the most important one in Florida's view. His most substantive definition of the Creative Class identifies its key characteristic to be "that its members engage in work whose function is to 'create meaningful new forms' " (68). (10) A broad definition, to be sure; the nature of these forms and their function is clarified in his elaboration of the kinds of work that constitute the Creative Class. Drawing on categories from the Occupational Employment Survey of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, he divides the Creative Class into two component elements: the Super-Creative Core and the Creative Class more generally. The first group includes workers across a wide field of employment categories:

   scientists and engineers, university professors, poets and
   novelists, artists, entertainers, actors, designers and architects,
   as well as the thought leadership of modern society: nonfiction
   writers, editors, cultural figures, think-tank researchers,
   analysts and other opinion-makers. Whether they are software
   programmers or engineers, architects or filmmakers, they fully
   engage in the creative process. I define the highest order of
   creative work as producing new forms or designs that are readily
   transferable and widely useful--such as designing a product that
   can be widely made, sold and used. (69)

The Super-Creative Core is paid to engage in the production of new forms that are transferable and useful. By contrast, while the rest of the Creative Class might at times produce new forms, it is "not part of the basic job description. What they are required to do regularly is think on their own" (69). The second group is just as broad and includes knowledge-intensive workers such as legal and health professionals, financial services workers, lawyers, and those who work in the high-tech industry. Should any of these workers have the opportunity to engage in the creation of new forms in their jobs--everything from new products to new job opportunities--they have the chance to move up to the Super-Creative level, "producing transferable, widely usable new forms" (69) as the main purpose of their professions.

Like commodities, such as oil or coal, or the work of labourers in tax-free zones or maquiladoras, for Florida creativity is an economic good. Indeed, it is not just one good amongst many. As he states directly in the preface to the paperback edition and repeats throughout the book: "Human creativity is the ultimate economic resource" (xiii). (11) Many might imagine creativity to be a quality or characteristic with intrinsic value--a value which isn't established by markets or through its utility or transferability. Florida sees things differently. For him, "creativity has come to be valued--and systems have evolved to encourage and harness it--because new technologies, new industries, new wealth and all other good economic things flow from it" (21). The contribution made by The Rise of the Creative Class is thus twofold. First, Florida plays the role of a lobbyist on behalf of creativity to government, business, and the general public, working tirelessly to get these sectors to recognize the importance of creativity to the economy. And second, in his role as a social scientist, he develops numerous theoretical and empirical schemes to understand better the creative-economic systems that have up until now evolved on their own. His aim is to help encourage and harness creativity, so that with the knowledge provided by social science these systems can operate even better, which will equally benefit nation-states and the lives of those workers whose creativity is currently being wasted in jobs that fall outside of the Creative Class.

A utopian vision, is it not? Who could be against more creativity in the world? And the outcomes that creativity seems to produce: more diverse and tolerant societies, better jobs and wealth for all. (12) Florida's view of the significance of the Creative Class for our collective futures in unambiguous: "We have evolved economic and social systems that tap human creativity and make use of it as never before. This in turn creates an unparalleled opportunity to raise our living standards, build a more humane and sustainable economy, and make our lives more complete" (xiii). This opportunity has not yet been taken up. Luckily, for this extraordinary future to be realized all that is needed is a completion of the "transformation to a society that taps and rewards our full creative potential" (xiii). A proud member of the thought leadership of "our" society, Florida is prepared to help light the path and to make a fortune (through his consultancy firm) along the way.

Despite his enthusiasm for the project of rendering the world safer for creativity, Florida's view of a social and economic system nearing perfection functions only to the degree that it fails to address or account for a number of issues that--given his subject matter and the concepts he employs--he cannot leave by the wayside. We can get a sense of these gaps and elisions by looking at the few moments in which he raises concerns or questions about the picture he paints. In a four-hundred page book that sometimes seems intent on addressing almost everything (Jimi Hendrix and the rise of agriculture, Thomas Frank and the Frankfurt School, Silicon Valley and Florida's own childhood skill at building wooden cars), there are only three moments of doubt or hesitation about the views for which he argues. These are worth citing in full:

   [The creative economy] is not a panacea for the myriad social and
   economic ills that confront modern society. It will not somehow
   magically alleviate poverty, eliminate unemployment, overcome the
   business cycle and lead to greater happiness and harmony for all.
   In some respects, left unchecked and without appropriate forms of
   human intervention, this creativity-based system may well make some
   of our problems worse. (23)

   My statistical research identifies a troubling negative statistical
   correlation between concentrations of high-tech firms and the
   percentage of the non-white population--a finding that is
   particularly disturbing in light of our findings on other
   dimensions of diversity. It appears that the Creative Economy does
   little to ameliorate the traditional divide between the white and
   nonwhite segments of the population. It may even make things worse.
   (262-63)

   Creativity is not an unmitigated good but a human capacity that can
   be applied toward many different ends. The scientific and technical
   creativity of the last century gave us wonderful new inventions,
   but also terrible new weapons. Massive, centralized experiments in
   new forms of economic and social life led to fiascos like the
   Soviet Union, while here in the United States, free-market
   creativity has turned out a great deal that is trivial, vulgar and
   wasteful. (325)

There is no comment offered following the first two quotations; they come at the end of sections, after which Florida's cheerleading enthusiasm resumes unabated. The third warning about the potential dangers of creativity comes in the book's conclusion, in which he directs his energies toward convincing the U.S. public and their governments to recognize and support the Creative Class. There is a meek defense offered concerning the potential for creativity to be put toward totalitarian uses or result in the detritus of consumer culture. Put simply, since creativity is now at the core of the economy and since it is only an increase in resources that will enable the potential to do "good in the world" (325), creativity remains essential, no matter that its results include everything from the atomic bomb to the doodads lining the shelves of dollar stores around the world.

What emerges in these three passages is what is almost entirely absent in the rest of the book: the political. Why a creativity-based system might make our problems worse is never specified; it also comes as somewhat of a surprise, given the tone and triumphalism of the book, to learn that it is not a panacea. One realizes in reading these passages that little or no mention has been made of poverty, unemployment, or the business cycle--or race and ethnicity, for that matter. Yet these are all crucial factors in shaping the experience of work and one's degree of economic participation. There are other ways to make sense of Florida's list of cities and their existing levels of Creative Class workers, which correlate precisely with poverty, unemployment, race, lack of access to education (required for Creative Class jobs), lack of mobility, and lack of opportunity. (13) These are deeply political issues, not mere externalities or afterthoughts to the system he describes. When ethnicity or immigration is discussed, it is framed by Florida as context or backdrop in an urban setting--urban colouring, in other words, much the same as a good alternative music scene: part of the necessary makeup of a city that allows white Creative Class members to feel good about themselves and the place they live. One of the reasons the political is missing--beyond, that is, that its inclusion would spoil the elegance of Florida's system and its apparently strong correlations between job type and so-called tolerance and diversity--is announced in his response to the problem introduced in the last passage above. When it comes right down to it, the logic of the economy trumps everything, even the possibility of the terrible new weapons that some members of the Creative Class are (without doubt) commissioned to design.

At one level, it would not be going too far to see the absence of the political as the absence of the world in general: the contingencies and challenges that shape economic decisions, civic policies, and urban planning are nowhere to be found. This is one of the reasons, perhaps, that there seems to be a fundamental confusion in Florida's work between cause and effect in imagining how urban spaces operate: nowhere does one have the production of creative city spaces that then attract creative workers (away from other creative cities, one can only imagine), but more the reverse is true, with certain kinds of cities emerging out of historically contingent processes of industry and labour. But it is perhaps more productive to focus on a smaller element of the book that nevertheless captures some of its wider absences; this attention will also bring us back around to the function of creativity in relation to culture. The limits of Florida's construction of the Creative Class and its future promise can be seen in the fact that in a book whose fundamental theme is labour, a real discussion of work is entirely absent. The Creative Class engages in the creation of meaningful new forms. It does so, however, as work, as an activity within corporations and institutions familiar to all of us (the ones that capture Florida's interest are high-tech giants such as Dell, Microsoft, and Apple). Work has a number of social and economic functions. One of the most important of these, the reason why a corporation or institution might hire a member of the Creative Class, is to generate a product or offer a service (transferable and useful, whether material or immaterial). This process is not carried out for the good of humanity but to generate profit. As any fourth grader knows, profit can only be realized if the amount one pays the creative staff (and the rest of the workers) is less than the income that can be generated by means of the product. This sense of work--as part of a system of profit, work as something necessary for life--never appears in The Rise of the Creative Class. Instead, it is essential for Florida to make the point that members of the Creative Class aren't motivated by money and that the Super-Creative Core makes even less than their Creative peers (77). In surveys which he cites, it workers indicate that work challenge, flexibility, and stability all come before base pay as reasons why they choose their jobs, with many other values (vacations, opinions being valued, etc.) standing only a few percentage points behind (88-101). For Florida, this interest in factors other than salary is viewed as a defining element of the Creative Class. Their desire for flexible and open forms of work, which allows them to avoid wearing a tie, to come late to work, or, better yet, to continue to work wherever and whenever (at home, on the subway, while shopping, while reading messages on their Blackberries, etc.) is seen as a sign not just of a new mode of labour freedom but a form of social freedom more generally.

Numerous social and cultural critics have drawn attention to the ways in which this apparent new-found freedom in fact covers up an expansion of the work day from nine to five to every aspect of one's life. (14) For those with a more systemic understanding of the economy and the changes it has undergone over the past two decades in particular, this liberalization of the work environment can be understood as little more than a new mode of labour management, whose overall aim remains that of generating as much profit as possible for companies and shareholders. If workers see their jobs as sites of self-definition, challenge, and freedom instead of the opposite, so much the better for the bottom line! The training of bodies willing to work at any time of the day--and to do so not due to exterior compulsion but because of some imagined, self-defining innate drive--is an easy way of increasing productivity without having to increase pay. Many critics and social commentators have expressed deep worries about the ways in which work in the new economy has come to entirely consume life; Florida expresses no such anxieties and even argues that such worries are overstated and beside the point. (15)

At its core, what is expressed in Florida's book is a fantasy of labour under capitalism: the possibility within capitalism of work without exploitation, of work as equivalent to play. What might give those of us who study the arts and culture pause here is how closely this vision approximates that of the ideal social function and purpose of culture--if in reverse. The aim of the historical avant-garde was to reject the deadened rationality of capitalist society through the creation of "a new life praxis from a basis in art" (Burger 49). Florida's characterization of the Creative Class suggests that this new life has in fact been achieved. The passage to the utopia of a new life praxis was supposed to occur via the transformation of life and work by art, such that art as a separate, autonomous sphere of life was no longer necessary. The division of art and life that first made the autonomous activity called art what it is would be undone through the critical activity of art itself. In Florida's vision of our creative present, work tends toward art by means of changes to the character of labour, partly as a result of technological developments and partly due to what can only be described as new-found enlightenment about the way in which the workplace should be configured. Equating the Creative Class with the activity of the avant-garde might seem far-fetched. It is, however, the fundamental way in which Florida envisions the social function of the Creative Class: as having collapsed different spheres of life together in such a way that what is now finally expressed socially is that innate element of creativity that makes us human and distinguishes us from the beasts. He writes, "we are impatient with the strict separations that previously demarcated work, home and leisure" (RCC 13). Luckily, we live at a time when these separations have become undone: "The rise of the Creative Economy is drawing the spheres of innovation (technological creativity), business (economic creativity) and culture (artistic and cultural creativity) into one another, in more intimate and more powerful combinations than ever" (201). And again: "Highbrow and lowbrow, alternative and mainstream, work and play, CEO and hipster are all morphing together today" (191).

This is, of course, more wish fulfillment than actually realized utopia. Florida imagines capitalism to have achieved what the avant-garde had wished to bring about as a means of undoing capitalism. How can this be? What enables and sustains the fantasy of capitalism as an avant-garde--capitalism as having gone beyond itself in the way art once imagined it could--is the concept of creativity itself. The history of the concept of creativity and the changes it has undergone over the centuries is enormously complicated. Suffice it to say that in terms of its recent history, creativity is most commonly associated with the act of generation in the fine arts. The idea that the production of a painting or musical score involves generation ex nihilo--the emergence of the new out of nothingness--sprang in part from the individualization of the artistic endeavour at the beginning of the nineteenth century and in part from the break with strictly determined formal categories within which artistic activities were supposed to be carried out. Artists are the model for the creative individual; they are also a model of a kind of labour done for intrinsic purposes and outside of the formal institutions of work.

Over the course of the twentieth century, creativity has come to be associated with all manner of activities: scientific discovery, mathematics, economics, business activity, and so on--anything thought to involve the production of newness of any sort. Despite its residual Romantic humanism, one effect of the expansion of uses of the term is to have rendered creativity into a synonym for originality or innovation. In Florida's use of the term, creativity becomes an act with even less specificity, being understood at times as little more than "problem-solving" of a kind that takes place all the time in work and daily life. Yet it is also essential that in virtually every one of its invocations in his work creativity retain its link to the arts and to (the imagined) freedoms and autonomy connected with such work. This is reinforced by the equivalences Florida repeatedly draws between the work of artists and engineers, musicians and computer scientists. There would be something critical missing in Florida's account if he was to champion the work not of the Creative Class but of "knowledge workers" the "postindustrial class," the "professional-managerial class," "symbolic analysts," or even "cognitive labourers." "Creative" obscures the work function of this class, transforming it into something much grander and more ideal than just a label for a new category of work in late capitalism. The genius of making use of "creative" and "creativity" in the way that Florida does is to render the world into something comprised--if not today, then just over the horizon--of nothing but artistic activity carried out through different forms of labour (not with paint, but XML; not by videos intended for the artist-run space, but for clients on the internet) and with different ends in mind. The distinctions between engineer, computer scientist, and lawyer thus become something akin to those between painter, sculptor, and filmmaker--variants of the same fundamental creative impulse.

The group that most fascinates Florida are workers in the high-tech industry in places such as Silicon Valley and Austin, Texas. His understanding of the nature of technological innovation, the creation of wondrous new hardware and software, shapes his sense of what constitutes creativity. Although he does not say as much, if artistic work stands as the model of what constitutes creative labour in general, new technology is the mechanism by which it is imagined that creativity can form the life activity of more and more people: innovation can eliminate tedious work, leaving only challenging work behind (the dream of a world without work, returned a half century later in a new form). There is, however, another level at which artistic labour and that of technological industries in which Florida is so interested can be seen as connected. At one point in RCC, Florida boasts that the number of people who identify themselves as artists and cultural workers expanded dramatically over the past half century in the United States, from 525,000 in 1950 to 2.5 million in 1999, "an increase of more than 375 percent" (46). He declines, however, to consider how such workers actually make a living, which is understandable since, for him, artists and cultural workers value the opportunity to enact their creative freedom much more than they worry about how they might eat.

Florida may be correct in identifying a connection between artists and workers in the knowledge industries of the "new economy." Where he is mistaken is the precise nature of this relationship. What is being carried over from artist to IT worker through the medium of creativity is the "cultural discount" that has long accompanied artistic labour of all kinds. One of the reasons why most artists aren't able to survive on the fruits of their labour is that it is assumed that they are "willing to accept non-monetary rewards--the gratification of producing art--as compensation for their work, thereby discounting the cash price of their labour" (Ross 6). Although IT workers are far better compensated for their work than artists, the adoption of an artistic relation to their work effects a similar labour discount that benefits their employer--even if they believe that the primary benefits are theirs. The characteristics of the postindustrial knowledge worker exemplary of Florida's Creative Class entail being "comfortable in an ever-changing environment that demands creative shifts in communication with different kinds of clients and partners; attitudinally geared toward production that requires long, and often unsocial, hours; and accustomed, in the sundry exercises of their mental labour, to a contingent, rather than a fixed, routine of self-application" (Ross 11). We are all artists now, which doesn't mean a life of unfettered freedom and creativity. Rather, it means that if we're lucky the labour of crunching code for long hours can be offset by no longer having to wear a tie to work and by getting to play with your colleagues at the corner foosball table once in awhile.

There is much more that one could criticize about Florida's vision of our collective futures. There is the fact, for instance, that despite the link he wishes to make between art and the Creative Class, in the end artists and musicians don't really get to play with the big boys of the IT world. The Bohemian index confirms that they are simply the humus out of which the creativity of technological types grows: just like ethnic diversity, they give a place its colour and maybe provide an occasional evening's entertainment. The limited vision Florida has of creativity--the almost complete crowding out, say, of any sense of the intrinsic value, or political or social function, of certain kinds of human activity--is indicated by his use of patents as a means to measure it and the unembarrassed description of creativity as pure utility, transferability, and economic functionality. Florida imagines the gradual expansion of the Creative Class so that it would one day encompass everyone. Who would be left to pull the espressos and cappuccinos so beloved by professors and bankers is unclear. What is clear, however, is that even amidst all the creativity in which the Creative Class and Florida himself engages, there is one "new" thing ruled out from the beginning: an entirely new economic system, one in which work would have a very different social character than liberal capitalism even at its most utopic might be able to provide.

Some concluding words are necessary to bring this back around to how we think about art and culture in Canada today. To be clear: Florida's views on creativity are less idiosyncratic than symptomatic. One finds these ideas circulating widely in the culture at large. It is endemic in the language of business and economics. As Paul Krugman writes (to take but one example), "in the 1990s the old idea that wealth is the product of virtue, or at least of creativity, made a comeback" (24). The redefinition of business as art via the concept of creativity might not seem to be an especially worrisome problem for the study of culture. Creativity was never really a feature of older conceptual vocabularies of cultural study (from Winckelmann to Kant to Lessing) and it is certainly not important in more recent ones. My criticisms of Florida might have pertinence to the ongoing ideological redefinition of work and even of social experience and expectation under neoliberalism yet only be of minor relevance to the practice of contemporary literary criticism, which has never needed creativity, even if creativity has been tied to the activity of art, literature, and culture in the quotidian vocabulary of the social.

But to this I want to sound two warnings. The first has to do precisely with the significance of these shifts in our social understanding of art and culture. In Florida's worldview, what was once dangerous or revolutionary about art has been fully domesticated. The freedom of the artist with respect to some aspects of the organization of their work has, as I argued above, become a model for work in general. As a result, it is thus only the social or political content and not its social form (as work) that might be threatening or dangerous. But once art becomes universalized through the spread of the discourse of creativity, this political challenge, too, is diluted. It is in the adventurous radicality of the artists exhibited in independent galleries and contemporary art museums that Florida locates the kindred spirits of creative workers in other parts of the economy; established museums that display the classics of Western art don't interest him or the Creative Class in the least. If everyone is participating in the same narrative of social development through creativity--artists and it workers, professors and bankers--what remains of art is to furnish the capitalist economy with ideas indirectly, through the spark or flash of a new concept that might emerge when a software designer is standing in front of a canvas denouncing technological capitalism. The reign of creativity thus poses challenges for the way in which theory and criticism operate today, even if creativity as such may not be a concept with particular theoretical salience within literary or cultural criticism.

But the challenge or threat goes beyond this. I suggested at the outset that creativity was a concept that was being used by both left and right. This essay has focused on the right's use of creativity, identifying Florida as the chief theorist and champion of an idea of creativity that transforms capitalism from a machine of exploitation into something that enables people to fully employ their innate capacities. But what about the left? On the left, too, the principle of creativity has come to form an important part of how the present social context is conceptualized. Especially in the work of writers associated with Italian autonomist thought, from Paolo Virno to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the current hegemony of postFordist, cognitive or affective labour is seen as making evident what was always already true about work but which has become structurally impossible to ignore today. Social prosperity is dependent on language, communication, knowledge, and creativity--that is, on the "general intellect" that Marx describes in a passage in the Grundrisse that has become a key part of contemporary left political philosophy. Although it might seem surprising to say so, the difference between right and left, between Florida and Virno, is not in their analysis of the structure of contemporary capitalism and the social and political developments that have accompanied it so much as the lessons that each draws from it. The postFordist labour utopia imagined by Florida is for left thinkers anything but the realization of a world without work; instead, it constitutes a new form of exploitation and perhaps an even more dangerous one given the ideological power of accounts of contemporary work such as that of Florida's. Creativity does flourish in contemporary capitalism, but insofar as it is put to use to generate profit, the potential political implications of this new situation are defused, at least temporarily. For the left, the increasing dependence of contemporary societies on forms of creative labour constitutes a political and imaginative opening--recognition (at long last) that capitalism needs labour far more than labour needs capitalism and that the sovereignty of the state can be replaced by a new society founded on the general intellect.

Yet despite the different lesson left and right draw from the social and political implications of postFordist work, they share a surprisingly common view of what constitutes creativity and its links to art, culture, and the aesthetic. In recent social and political thought, creativity seems to have become nothing short of the defining element of human being: we are no longer homo faber but homo genero. As in the case of Florida, creativity on the left finds its referent in an idealized vision of artistic labour and a skewed view of the character of classical aesthetics and is also imagined as what needs to be enabled and set loose in order for there to be genuine social freedom. In a recent interview, Virno points to the troubling integration of aesthetics into production but in so doing affirms a view of aesthetics that is reminiscent of Florida's own claims about the place of creativity in human nature. (16) While admitting at the outset of this long interview that his knowledge of modern art "is actually very limited" Virno is fearless in extending several of his key concepts to discussions of art and aesthetics, such as "virtuosity" one of many names for the innate productive capacity of human beings, which in the work of Antonio Negri goes by the name "constituent power." If left discourses are attuned to the blind spots that exist in Florida's celebration of the conditions of work under contemporary capital, they nevertheless enact the same rhetorical and conceptual gesture of transforming human activity (or at least its potential) as such into art--and an idea of art taken not from sociology but from fantasies about its ideal relationship to something called creativity.

The effect once again is to render mute the critical capacities and political function of art and culture, even as it becomes coterminous with human life activity as such. Contemporary left theoretical discourse might not result in increased funding for the arts, but its temptations for cultural theory can be just as great--and just as problematic. It places art at the centre of politics but only by doing away with the significance of art as art. Contemporary art and cultural production have a social specificity that plays an essential role in their political function. They don't need to think of themselves as creative or as the exemplar of creative acts. Indeed, it would seem that the farther they stay away from the intellectual and political traffic in creativity, the greater suspicion with which they treat this mobile and uncritically accepted discourse, the more likely they are able to continue to challenge the limits of our ways of thinking, seeing, being, and believing.

Works Cited

Brooks, David. Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001.

Burger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

Chua, Amy. Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--and Why They Fall. New York: Doubleday, 2007.

Florida, Richard. Cities and the Creative Class. New York: Routledge, 2004.

--. The Flight of the Creative Class. New York: Harper Business, 2005.

--. The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity. Toronto: Random House, 2010.

--. "How the Crash Will Reshape America." Atlantic Monthly, March 2009. Web. 3 August 2010.

--. The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books, 2003.

--. Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life. New York: Basic Books, 2008.

--. "The World is Spiky." Atlantic Monthly. October 2005: 48-51.

Fraser, Jill Andresky. White Collar Sweatshop. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002.

Krugman, Paul. The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009.

Marazzi, Christian. The Violence of Financial Capitalism. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010.

Marx, Karl. "The German Ideology: Part 1." The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978. 146-75.

--. Grundrisse. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.

Negri, Antonio. Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State. Trans. Maurizia Boscagli. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Peck, Jamie. "The Creativity Fix." Eurozine, 28 June 2007. Web. 18 January 2010.

Ross, Andrew. "The Mental Labour Problem." Social Text 63 (2000): 1-31.

--. Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times. New York: New York up, 2009.

Schor, Juliet. The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. New York: Basic Books, 1993.

Terranova, Tiziana. "Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy." Social Text 18.2 (2000): 33-58.

Virno, Paolo. "The Dismeasure of Art. An Interview with Paolo Virno." Open 17 (2009). Web. 22 February 2010.

Imre Szeman

University of Alberta

(1) I take the first phrase in title from Jamie Peck's excellent "The Creativity Fix."

(2) See The Flight of the Creative Class, in which he examines the global competition of states and cities to attract members of this class; Cities and the Creative Class, which constitutes an elaboration of his description of the communities creative workers are attracted to and in which they flourish; and Who's Your City?, which puts his analysis to use in the form of a city guide for members of the creative class.

(3) See Florida's The Great Reset and his article "How the Crash Will Reshape America."

(4) Although the CCNC predates Florida's books, its growth and expansion since becoming a not-for-profit organization in 2002 has been enabled by the spread of the idea that city spending on culture supports economic development. The CCNC acts as advocate of and clearinghouse for ideas linking culture and economic development. For example, the January 2010 Creative City News reports on the investment of $5 million by the City of Woodstock in the creation of a new art gallery; the December 2009 newsletter includes stories on urban investments in culture in places such as Barrie and Collingwood, Ontario, and Halifax, Nova Scotia.

(5) Governments across the world have in recent years produced planning strategies for their cultural sector in relation to its economic impact or have developed new departments of government to manage the economics of culture. To give a few examples: Winnipeg is concluding its year as Cultural Capital of Canada with the production of an arts and culture strategy document, "Ticket to the Future: The Economic Impact of the Arts and Creative Industries in Winnipeg." In the United Kingdom, the Creative and Cultural Skills unit of the national government announced 1.3 million [pounds sterling] to create two hundred culture jobs for young people claiming unemployment benefits, including positions "such as theatre technician, costume and wardrobe assistant, community arts officer and business administrator."

The action is just as great on the international level. Numerous international conferences focus on culture and economics, such as the annual Culturelink Conference (the third meeting of which was held in Zagreb, Croatia, in 2009) and the World Summit on the Arts (the fourth meeting held in Johannesburg in 2009). The recently released report of the Commonwealth Group on Culture and Development, a body established in 2009, links the achievement of development goals with the support of culture. And UNESCO's November 2009 World Report, "Investing in Cultural Diversity and Intercultural Dialogue," warns governments against cutting funding to culture during the current financial crisis, not just because it will impact on the issues contained in the report's title but because such fiscal cost saving will have a deep impact on any possible financial recovery.

(6) Less so for state or national governments: just as for thinkers such as Saskia Sassen, for Florida the city is the primary political and economic unit of the contemporary era. See, for example, his review of Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat, "The World is Spiky"

(7) The Canadian edition of Who's Your City? extends this analysis to Canada, if in a more limited way.

(8) "This milieu provides the underlying eco-system or habitat in which the multidimensional forms of creativity take root and flourish. By supporting lifestyle and cultural institutions like a cutting-edge music scene or vibrant artistic community, for instance, it helps to attract and stimulate those who create in business and technology" (RCC 55).

(9) This quotation is unattributed by Florida, as are a number of others in the book. The likely source for the quotation is Max Wertheimer, one of the founders of Gestalt theory.

(10) The quotation Florida includes here is unattributed.

(11) The number of times this claim is asserted is too numerous to cite, but take for instance statements such as these at opposite ends of the book: "Today's economy is fundamentally a Creative Economy" (RCC 44) and "Creativity is the fundamental source of economic growth" (RCC 317).

(12) The critical importance of tolerance to manage the perpetuation of hegemony appears in numerous works in the genre of the popular books on current affairs. See, for example, Amy Chua, Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--and Why They Fall.

(13) Mobility is presumed to be a central characteristic of the Creative Class. They can go wherever they want, which is why cities have to make certain that they have the appropriate environs to attract them. Yet even in the case of certain members of the Super-Creative Core, this mobility is close to a fiction. For example, academics find it extremely difficult to move; the nature of their work means that they have to participate in specific kinds of institutions (universities and colleges) that aren't found in the same proportion as institutions of private industry and many of which are located in smaller cities and towns. There's a reason why Durham, NC, and State College, pa, rank highly on his rankings of creative cities: it's not because they have a huge number of amenities (art, coffee houses, alternative music, etc.) that exist outside of work but because the nature of the institutions that exist there render large number of PHDS (especially relative to population) immobile.

(14) There are a number of texts that examine the causes and consequences of the production of " 'free labor' of users, i.e., of a labor that is not paid and not supervised, but is nonetheless controlled" (Terranova). See, for instance, Jill Andresky Fraser, White Collar Sweatshop; Christian Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capitalism; Andrew Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times; Juliet Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure; and Tiziana Terranova, "Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy."

(15) "The no-collar workplace is not being imposed on us from above; we are bringing it on ourselves ... We do it because we long to work on exciting projects with exciting people. We do it because as creative people, it is a central part of who we are or want to be" (RCC 134).

(16) "There is an aesthetic base component in human nature." Paolo Virno.

IMRE SZEMAN is Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies and Professor of English, Film Studies, and Sociology at the University of Alberta. His most recent books are Cultural Theory: An Anthology (2010, co-edited with Tim Kaposy) and After Globalization (2011, co-authored with Eric Cazdyn).