Surfing with Horkheimer and Adorno in the O.C.

Abstract

Seminar In Experimental Critical Theory V University Of California Humanities Research Institute Irvine, California August 11-22, 2008 During two weeks this August, cultural critics, media theorists, artists, union organizers, gamers, and bloggers gathered amid the malls and mega churches of Irvine, California. Media theorist Toby Miller and critical race scholar David Theo Goldberg organized the fifth Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory (SECT) around the theme Societies/Cultural Industries/New Humanities. We were in the O.C. to discuss neoliberal uses of cultural production--branded as industries--for global urban development and labor schemes. It seemed appropriate to be doing this in the place where so many of the Frankfurt School refugees, architects of the critique of the culture industry, did time. In addition to Miller and Goldberg, presenters included John Hartley, Dick Hebdige, Richard Maxwell, Angela McRobbie, Kate Oakley, Lisa Parks, Andrew Ross, and Yuezhi Zhao. Creative industries or cultural industries (CIs) are the names given to the influential policy movement that proposes that creative individuals (everyone from artists, designers, and architects to workers in mass media and IT) are the key labor sector for post-industrial structural transformations in urban economies. This drives the ubiquitous transformation of vacant buildings into lofts and the need for every city to have their own starchitect-designed museum. Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class (2002), is a central and controversial figure in this policy movement. Florida advises cities to direct planning and policy with in mind because jobs, development, and economic revitalization will follow this class to the cities they inhabit. The presentation at SECT began from the assumption that CI policies are part of a larger shift that, as Miller pointed out in his introductory remarks, has been occurring at least since 1966 when Ronald Reagan, then a California gubernatorial candidate, gave a speech proposing the evisceration of Great Society programs with the Creative Society. The Creative Society would depend on individuals, instead of government, to solve social problems. This was a convenient response to the declining industrial sector of the United States economy and the exporting of manufacturing. All that was left to domestically produce was intellectual property, culture, and creativity. This shift, however, would require a recasting of the role of the arts and humanities. They could no longer simply endow the elite with cultural capital and train them to be effective industrialists; they must also produce a resource to be mined--the creative individual. One of the central critiques of CI policy, presented convincingly at SECT by Ross, is the way creativity is used to justify the global destabilization of jobs. The mythology of the struggling artist working happily on the periphery of society, paycheck to paycheck, gig to gig, becomes and model for all types of work recast as flexible and creative. But how do we address the differences between a workforce of individuals who genuinely desire to be free agents and the forced precarious labor of post-Fordism? …