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184 Pages·2015·3.59 MB·English
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Alienation@work: Creativity and Commerce in Late Capitalism Nathan Gerard Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2015 © 2015 Nathan Gerard All rights reserved ABSTRACT Alienation@work: Creativity and Commerce in Late Capitalism Nathan Gerard “I keep doing it over and over again, and there’s no sort of creative point,” says a young digital designer. “When I started, people warned me how shitty it was, and when new people start, I try to tell them too,” explains a colleague in the field. “I’ve got to quit my job. I’ve got nothing to go to, but I’ve got to quit my job because I’m creatively dying,” adds another. On the surface, members of the “creative class” rarely come across as disaffected or disassociated employees. Often lauded for their self-sufficiency, authenticity and unconventionality, creative workers are supposed to be fulfilled in their jobs and carry the promise of urban renewal and economic growth. But recent studies suggest that even the “super-creative core” of the creative class—those working at the intersections of art, design and technology—can suffer an acute form of estrangement. Alienation@work explores the experiences of creative workers in-depth to reveal an alarming trend. In a world where economic transactions disguise themselves as experiential transformations, and surplus value comes in the form of a Twitter tweet, members of the creative class are called upon to exert not just cognitive and emotional but existential labor. As a result, they often lose the ability to know just where work ends and where life begins, and struggle to separate “what I do” from “who I am.” Alienation, once the result of a psychological distancing from one’s labor, now manifests from an uncanny closeness and over-identification. Could the creative class, once the harbinger of hope, be the sign of impending disaster? Alienation@work uncovers how creative workers cope with their situation and how they manage to re-claim their creativity against the odds. Findings from 32 phenomenological interviews reveal how the rise in commodified experiences may simply serve as an index of the decline in truly shared ones, unmediated by the market, while the burgeoning “creative economy” may simply fill a void formed by the vacuum of true creativity’s absence. Alienation@work argues for a radical revision of what constitutes creative work, both to attenuate today’s form of alienation and to reclaim life from the colonizing forces of capital. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Tables ………………………………………………………………………………. ii Preface ……………………………………………………………………………………….. v Introduction: Creative Work? ……………………………………………………….. 1 Chapter 1: “Who We Are” ………………………………………………….......... 14 Chapter 2: The Fight for Life …………………………………………………….. 22 Chapter 3: Cursed Creatives ……………………………………………………… 34 Chapter 4: Collective Sublimation ……………………………………………… 50 Chapter 5: Method …………………………………………………………………… 64 Chapter 6: Findings …………………………………………………………………. 80 Chapter 7: Analyses …………………………………………………………………. 109 Chapter 8: Conclusion ……………………………………………………………… 135 Notes …………………………………………………………………………………………. 147 References …………………………………………………………………………………. 153 Appendices ………………………………………………………………………………… 163   i LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Demographics ………………………………………………………………. 72 Table 2: Presenting Problem ………………………………………………………. 77 Table 3: Coping (Mechanisms of Defense) …………………………………… 78 Table 4: Proposed Solutions ………………………………………………………. 79 Table 5: Character Types …………………………………………………………… 132   ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful for the enthusiastic interest of my dissertation committee—John Broughton, Peter Fleming, George Gushue, Debra Noumair, and Lyle Yorks—and especially Debra and Lyle, who’ve been with me from the beginning. And a special thanks goes out to Peter, my mentor across the pond, who graciously joined the team in the 11th hour and continues to be a tremendous intellectual inspiration. Above all, I wish to thank my research participants, who were so generous in making and unmaking sense with me. If I had to re-write this text I would let them speak more for themselves. But such is the unfortunate nature of academic writing that I must tell an abstract, and therefore, ultimately alienated story. I hope they may still find value in this wayward journey.   iii DEDICATION For Madeline Gins (1941-2014) Friend, mentor, and fellow puzzle creature   iv PREFACE It used to be that Nike made shoes. Amazing shoes. I can still recall the debut of the AirMax 1 at the Foot Locker in Tanglewood Mall, the pride of southwest Roanoke, Virginia. My best friend Justin and I clamored, practically stumbled over each other for a glimpse of the first-ever Visible Air Unit—Nike’s window into the sole. A summer’s worth of chores and a life’s worth of prayers to The Shoe God Almighty, and we finally earned our chance to run completely on air. Lacing up our gravity-defying kicks for the first time, we dashed headlong down a suburban street, confirming our hypothesis: our speed had doubled. God seemed closer to me in 1987 than he does now. Amy, who you’ll meet in this text, declares that Nike doesn’t make things anymore. “They’ve gotten beyond just selling items,” she says with an air of expertise. “What do you mean?” I ask. “Advertisements in the traditional sense don’t work anymore. You can no longer just tell people to buy something. They’re not interested. Why listen to you?” Good question. But what does work,” she continues after a pregnant pause, “is this idea of experience as brand.” “What do you mean?” I ask again. “Basically you can take an experience, any experience, and create a product around it. Take the experience of exercise. Nike’s no longer a representation of   v exercise, like I’m wearing running shoes. Nike is exercise. Nike’s gotten beyond just selling items to selling the idea of exercise itself, using like the Nike fuel band, using like the Nike plus, going online and having this digital component which tracks all this. So the entire product is no longer just one thing. It’s the sensor that’s on your shoe, its the watch that you’re wearing, its your heart rate monitor, it’s the software on your iphone, which you can pull up at anytime to see your progress, its similarly the tablet application which all synchs up, and the website experience—it’s all one experience.” It’s all one experience. Fascinated, terrified, I ask for another example.     “For example, if you’ve ever bought an Apple product you’ll see how much effort they put into the packaging, the ‘unboxing’ we call that. And so when you open the box, how it opens, how the flap, uh, kind of pulls up, how it folds over, unfolds open and how it’s neatly tucked away and perfectly symmetrical, and white, and the box is matt. How special do you feel when you’re opening this? It’s coming into your life, you know, and its not just thrown together with a bunch of plastic, with you know, some instruction manuals kind of shoved in. No, it’s this start-to-end experience…So Nike no longer tells you that ‘we’re about exercise.’ Nike is exercise. You know, the entire experience is built around that. And Apple is the same thing. Apple is ease-of-use.” * * * Amy calls herself an experience designer. But she might as well be a god. After all, only an all-knowing Intelligent Designer would be able to predict and craft   vi

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special thanks goes out to Peter, my mentor across the pond, who .. Today, it is not just labor but life itself that serves as the engine . (Murat, 2013). alienation accompanied not by the cry of revolution but by a numbing yawn.
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