Literature and the Creative Economy by Sarah Brouillette (review)

Abstract

Sarah Brouillette. Literature and the Creative Economy. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2014. Pp. x, 238. US$45. For all its problems as a descriptive term, neoliberalism can usefully point to a historically unprecedented convergence of culture, capital, and state governance arguably articulated most comprehensively the economy. According to Sarah Brouillette's Literature and the Creative Economy, literature has been central to the implementation of economy frameworks, both because ideas about the literary and the author figure inform discourses of the economy and because authors express a characteristic ambivalence towards art's instrumentalization their work, lending an air of authenticity to economy policies. Brouillette argues that, while literature can critique the detrimental effects of the neoliberal and expose the negative affects experienced by cultural workers, in its criticality, literature can also exemplify and internalize some of the most foundational aspects of the creative-economy turn (13). Her book considers the role that the literary arts have come to play neoliberal governance, from gentrification and multiculturalism to the fostering of a society of self-managing cultural workers, as well as the impact of economy policies on literary treatments of pathology, authenticity, and autonomy. Literature and the Creative Economy traces the discursive histories that inform the economy and the figure of the subject at its centre, beginning with an analysis of Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class (2002). Following dwindling levels of agricultural and industrial production, a new group of workers has, according to Florida, moved to the forefront of the economy--the creative class. As entrepreneurial bearers of human capital, Florida claims, members of the class prefer flexibility and diversity to stability and tradition, which he argues policymakers and urban planners should take into account. This leads Brouillette to draw compelling parallels between the figure of the culture worker at the centre of economy discourse and the subject of Italian autonomist Marxism. For both Florida and the autonomists, self-expression undergirds contemporary labour, and although their perspectives diverge drastically terms of what this means for human freedom they nevertheless agree that freedom and creativity are fundamentally linked. While autonomists like Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Antonio Negri decry rather than celebrate the convergence of human creativity and capital, their theories of immaterial labour take for granted the idea of a naturally subject whose capacity for innovation provides the means for realizing their autonomy from restrictive social forces. Building on her critique of Florida, Brouillette discusses how, the discourse of the economy, the social comes to figure as a constraining force against which the spirit struggles to express itself, echoing the foundational gesture of neoliberalism. Informed by psychologists like Abraham Maslow, whose work underlies the neoliberal to self-management, economy discourse picks up the idea of authentic self-realization through labour. For Maslow and the many management theorists for whom his work has been influential, the figure of the artist--here understood as spontaneous, driven by intrinsic passions, thriving amidst insecurity, and balking at tradition--provides the model subject for the economy, since Maslow sees self-expression as the means to produce a society of dedicated workers able to effectively navigate the chaotic instabilities of late capitalism. Shifting her focus the second part of the book to relationships between the economy and the literary arts, Brouillette argues that Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (2008) and Monica Ali's In the Kitchen (2009) include protagonists for whom social and political adversities arising from their racialized positions within neoliberal capitalism figure as temporary problems of the psyche that they might remedy through a renewed commitment to work. …