: Creativity and Commerce in Late Capitalism Nathan Gerard Submitted in partial ...

184 Pages·2015·3.59 MB·English

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

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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

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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.

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DEDICATION

For Madeline Gins (1941-2014)
Friend, mentor, and fellow puzzle creature

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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

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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

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