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ADAM ARVIDSSON
“Creative Class and Creative Proletariat? Class
composition and immaterial labour in the Copenhagen cultural industries”
by Adam Arvidsson [University
of Copenhagen]
Summary:
This paper builds on my ongoing empirical research in the Copenhagen ‘knowledge
economy’. Recently a wide variety of established culture industries, from large
clothing chains like H&M to advertising agencies, have developed
sophisticated techniques to appropriate and profit from the autonomous cultural
production that unfolds in the urban environment. Outside creative talent is
hired on short contracts (or sometimes not paid at all) and techniques like
trend scouting and ‘user led innovation’ aim at positing the ‘mass
intellectuality’ of urban cultural production as a positive externality. The
reasons for this development are primarily twofold. Firstly the culture
industries find themselves pushed towards a greater variety and flexibility of
output. Secondly information and communication technologies have enhanced the
productivity of the urban ‘bohemie’.
This paper seeks to construct a model for the immaterial value chain in the case
of the Copenhagen culture industry with a particular view towards mechanisms of
exploitation and class composition.
CV: Adam Arvidsson,
Ph.D. European University Institute, Florence 2000, Associate Professor of
Media Studies, University of Copenhagen, author of Brands.Meaning and Value
in Media Culture, London Routledge, 2005, Marketing Modernity Italian
Advertising from Fascism to the Postmodern, London; Routledge, 2003.
Presently working on a book on ‘Immaterial Labour’.
This book wants to make a very simple argument:
that brands should be understood an insitutional embodiment of the logic of a
new form of informational capital -much like the factory embodied the logic of
industrial capital. Brand management is a matter of putting to work the
capacity of consumers (and increasingly other kinds of actors) to produce a
common social world through autonomous processes of communication and
interaction. This capacity to produce a common is empowered and programmed to
unfold in ways that create the measurable kinds of attention and affect that
underpin the commerical values of brands. Like informational capital in
general, brands extract value by putting to work the very basic human capacity
to create a common social world.
This book thus attempts at an analysis of the brand
as an institution, I have tried to capture its logic. There are of course many
other things to be said about brands: their role in the life of consumers,
their very particular ontological status, how to manage and nurture them, how
they can be more or less successful, etc. This book touches these matters only
superficially (but there is a lengthy bibliography). Let me stress from the
start that, even though I argue that brands ‘work with’ or presuppose the
‘resistance’ or ‘agency’ of consumers, I do not believe that the control that
brand management exercises is ‘total’ or impossible to escape. On the contrary,
in the conclusion I argue that the institution of the brand is a symptom of the
general weakness of captialist command that marks informational
capitalism.
My purpose in this book has been to provide an
analysis, rather than a critique of brands. To be critical of brands per se, is
about as fruitful as to be critical of factories or bureaucracies. Brands are
an an instituion that can be put to good uses as well as bad ones, that can be
progressive as well as reactionary. And, I think, brands will be with us for a
long time. Today they are mostly used for marketing purposes. But I would not
be surprised if the next wave of social movements were to be somehow modelled
on the brand, much like the workers movement of the last turn of the century
were modelled on the bureaucracy.
E-mail: [email protected]