Text Sushi by Alf Rehn

After Creativity (a fragment, full chapter forthcoming in a book I’m editing with Niina Koivunen)

Creativity, After the Ball
Can creativity keep its luster? In five or ten or fifteen years, will we still sing the same praises? The contemporary fascination for the concept, coupled with an almost religious belief in policy circles as to its magic powers – powers through which there mere reference to the ‘creative economy’ can instantly revive ailing regions and create bohemian utopias out of crumbling urban areas – has pushed the discussion into a well-known territory, that of buzzwords and hype. We have seen this show before, with the fad for Japanese management, with the notion that ‘quality’ would prove to be an organizational panacea, with the belief in knowledge as the sole engine of economic development. We have loved and later lost, been both bewitched and sorely disappointed. Concepts that once seemed to carry all the promise of a better day have later been put to rest, gone fallow. Creativity seems ominously well-positioned to take its place in this rather tattered hall of fame foregone. Still, creativity seems to be something else, something more powerful. The ever-returning, the hallowed, the Phoenix arising from its own ashes. Creativity is something more than a buzzword, even if it is used as one now. But exactly what more than a buzzword?
The key issue, for me and in this chapter, is the one of how the concept of creativity can remain meaningful in a situation where a number of well-meaning adherents have done their darndest to neuter it and turn it into a Disneyfied version of itself. Where creativity is meant to represent a force that continuously challenges and questions, a number of contemporary understandings have reduced it into little more than grist for the same old corporate mill or worse still, into a tool for policy-makers and EU-bureaucrats. This obviously is a question of power, i.e. how a concept can lose power by being subjected to hegemonic forces that domesticate it, and how we are to analyze the prevailing ideology of creativity, specifically if we are interested in how creativity as a conceptual field can develop in the future. Rather than holding on to the promise of creativity and our faith therein, we must see to the possibility of abandoning the concept if it loses its potential to bring radically new effects into our thinking.
Note that this is not meant as an attack on creativity, nor an attack on the notion of a creative economy. Rather it is an attempt to ask what needs to be done in order to save a successful concept from itself. By introducing notions of power, ideology and a form of conceptual resistance into the discussion I am not trying to claim that contemporary theories of creativity are irredeemably compromised or naïve, but instead posit a series of questions as to what creativity theory needs to overcome, what might supplant the creative economy, and what kind of critique is needed in order to keep up the promise and potential of creativity itself.

A Note on the Historiography of Creativity
The story of creativity has been a varied one. In the beginning, creativity came from the gods, imbued the chosen with an energy to do great things, yet in a way that made the creators merely a vessel within which the divine will could deposit creativity. Later, gods were taken out of the equation, and creativity was recast as a spark of humanity at its finest, the light of genius. Later still, creativity was the domain of everyman, could she just find it within herself. Today, creativity is presented as a permanent presence as well as a permanent lack. Media and the sciences present everything from gardening to biotech-engineering as positively infused with the creative possibilities, laud economies that utilize and reinforce the creative industries, and make heroes out of those who manage to best live up to the image of the true creative.
We can in this capsule history, as well as in creativity writing more generally, find an overarching theme where creativity is inextricably linked to progress, and where the different tropes through which creativity is presented serve as a narrative through which humanity continuously improves. We could question this optimist history by asking whether this march of progress can be proven or if it is a creation after the fact, but we shall here refrain from such analyses. The important thing is that the creative economy today is normally narrated as the pinnacle of a long development, where the agrarian was overtaken by the feudal, the industrial by the knowledge society, and now the creative economy stands tall as a conqueror, albeit in bohemian drag.
But whereas the history of creativity has been written as a saga of continuous victory, where every age has had its proper creative genius, this writing of our contemporary history shows something else. Now creativity is not just something that is lauded, but also something we fear we do not have enough of. In a grand modernist gesture we have proclaimed the end of creative history in order to posit ourselves in a post-industrial paranoia, where the triumph of the creatives has led to a situation where the economy is built on a permanent lack. Where the previous economic revolutions all built on the notion of more effective utilization of resources, and the possibility to replicate or otherwise create these, the discourse of the creative economy shares an odd resemblance with the politics of an agrarian economy, and odder still, a kinship with the thinking of the physiocrats. Where the latter argued that the limits to how much land there was would always dominate all other economic matters, the creatocrats are now locked in an anguish regarding whether any system has ‘enough’ creativity. We can find this new angst at its purest in the writings of Richard Florida (2002, 2006), where the creative class is portrayed as a truly limited resource which must be mollycoddled much like rare orchids, and which when mistreated will wilt, die, and leave behind a barren landscape.
This obsession with the lack, which has led to calls for tax breaks, better understanding among managers, a plethora of attempts to create creative hotbeds, also signal how the most fundamental aspect of writings on creativity is in fact their fear that the creativity will run out. The sometimes obsessive way in which e.g. management and organization studies has lauded creativity could then be read not so much as a glorification of a dimension of humanity, but a strict resource-based analysis of the world. Creativity has become a conceptual weapon in the econo-political sphere, where the fear of not having enough, of not being able to generate enough, in short, to not be able to amass and gather, drives this new logic in a way that we can recognize from the old analyses of capitalist accumulation.
So in our current age, where the creative industries are touted as the most dynamic, most rapidly growing sector of the economy, and where the creative economy itself is presented as a force unto its own, one could in the vein of Meghnad Desai (2002) or critical management studies more generally say that might be seeing an intensification of the capitalist process, a colonization and effectivization of an area previously less exploited. In such an analysis, the grim possibility of creativity being sucked dry becomes a possibility, pointing towards a particular kind of economic endtimes where every human endeavor finally becomes commodified, commercialized, and market-priced. If even opera can be counted into the machinery of the capitalist engine, what is there left to do but grease its wheels and despondently look towards the time when every single thing is perfectly monetized and marketized? Such a grim view might seem like the pessimistic condemnations of a particularly despondent post-marxist (in other words, like Theodor Adorno on a bad day), but it can also be seen as an antidote to the sometimes absurd claims that are made in the name of creativity and the potential of the creative economy.

On the Creative Nature of Creativity
In another context I, together with Christian De Cock (De Cock & Rehn 2008), have commented on the peculiar ontological position of creativity. While the concept might seem easy to grasp, even self-evident, the nature of creativity is such that it is exceedingly difficult if not impossible to define. If creativity is about going beyond what it, this clearly creates a problem when trying to pin the concept down. Namely, if creativity is breaking out of pre-defined boxes, this same principle must logically apply to creativity too. Any definition of the concept would seem to be contradictory, as they all simultaneously say that creativity is the thing defined, and that creativity is about breaking with the prevailing (which would include the definition). In other words, creativity will logically always deconstruct itself. Any attempt to limit or define it will fall pray to the logical necessity of the definition not covering all the potential uses of the concept. This paradoxical nature is not a flaw, but as our thinking to a great extent is geared towards causal explanations, the openness of creativity to new forms of expression makes it exceptionally difficult to fit into a theoretical scheme with anything close to completeness. Instead, the amorphous nature of the concept will always escape totalizations.
Following this, we could ask if not the creative economy might not be best understood through the concept of decay, so that every move towards establishing a limited economy of the creative will by necessity empty out the very condition of its creation. The creative economy can, in a sense, only exist if and only if it is prepared for annihilation. Whatever creativity is inherent in the starting of an economic endeavor, this will become part of the normal, natural makeup thereof, thus slowly losing the energy that was the original driving force. This is of course something that we know well from the literature on entrepreneurship, but taken on a more general level this questions whether there can be such a thing as a stable foundation of the creative economy.
Every time we bring in a creative move into the structure of management, this will position it in a way that subtly moves away from creativity through the process of structuring/standardizing knowledge, introducing regimes of effectiveness and pricing, and commoditization. This argument should be well known from critical theory, but my use of it here can easily be misinterpreted. I am not arguing that the process through which creativity is brought to the market is unethical, amoral or inhuman, as the ethical aspect of the market economy do not interest me here. Rather, I am interested in how writings of creativity and management or the creative economy are in fact setting up knowledge regimes around creativity, and thus lessening it. As Michel Foucault (1980) pointed out, any form of knowledge contains within it a procedure of repression and control, and we must pay strict attention to structures of power/knowledge. Yet, in the discourse of creativity and economy such aspects are strangely absent, and if they come into fore it is usually to point out that there will be power-games between managers and ‘the creatives’, not that creativity in and of itself might contain power-dimensions. With regards to the previously mentioned implicit resource-view of creativity, this omission becomes doubly strange.
Another way to put this is to point out that the point “after creativity” alluded to in the title of this text can be read in at least two ways. It can be read in a limited fashion, one where the time after creativity would be one where creativity has run out, either due to exploitation or due to insufficient support and attention. This in a resource-based view. However, I want to contend that regardless of how one reaches this conclusion, such a reading is built on a limited view of creativity, the one referenced to in the issue regarding whether creativity can be defined or not. Another reading would emphasize that any word/concept will always become tainted by the ideological context(s) that amass around it, and in order to free ourselves (becoming creative) we need to go beyond the word itself. Staying wedded to a singular interpretation or singular theorization of a concept such as creativity will by logical necessity become highly un-creative, and it is in fact necessary to look for a point after or post- if the concept is to retain any meaning.
In yet other words, is it creative to assume that the creative economy is important? In an age where every single politician and bureaucrat is more than willing to embrace such a statement, would not the creative thing to do be to renounce the creative economy, to proclaim that creativity is no longer interesting? Obviously such moves are difficult to make, as we are caught up in webs of language and ideology, but the question is nevertheless intriguing.

[Continued in the book "Creativity and Contemporary Economy" that I'm editing with Niina Koivunen.]

Check out the fan group for iPod and Philosophy! And yes, I have a chapter in the book…

Alf Rehn
MARX’S LAUGHTER
Frivolity and economic reason

I.
Economy, it seems, is no laughing matter. Economy, it seems, is the real deal, the serious matters, the no-frills package. Where economics is the dismal science, business studies is obviously the serious science, the research of that which is done for a reason. And the reasons for doing are, in this field, always assumed to be serious. Still, since the very beginning of organized economic activity in the Paleolithic era, most of the energy and resources expended have gone towards the frivolous – the production of toys and baubles. If we take the notion of economic necessity seriously, we will very quickly realize that the production of necessities is at best a marginal endeavor, with the main expenditure of economic energy going to all kinds of frippery and luxuries – such as cars. Even though we as individuals may think cars to be necessities for us, it is pretty obvious that our lives do not hinge on the existance of cars. In fact, moder mans need of a car can be seen as the result of a culturally constucted system, and this can in itself be seen as a societal luxury. Or even, in a more wide-sweeping statement about the world, a society of and by luxury. At the same time, management and organization studies has, due to an unfortunate fallacy embedded at the very core of the field, almost exclusively studied ‘serious’ businesses (e.g. car manufacture, steel mills et cetera), without paying heed to the contingent and culturally mediated nature of these, and thus mistakenly believing such culturally mediated seriousness to be the primary economic area. Thus, most (if not all) of management studies as a field is based on a view of economy that is, quite simply, wrongheaded. The validity of such management studies consequently comes into question, being rooted not in economic facts but in moralizations about economy. The role played by man’s unquenchable thirst for frivolities (such as games, fun, pleasure, joy, toys, trinkets – and cars) is perhaps even more pronounced today, in contemporary post-industrial society, but has always played the main role in economy – note that e.g. world trade and globalization originated in the business of spices and drugs (coffee, tea, tobacco), frivolities of the first order.

One person who has noted this, grasped it, and presented us with a theory within which this can be understood, is Claes Gustafsson, long-serving professor of industrial management at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. Drawing on a lifetime of reading philosophy, anthropology, primatology and various other sciences, he in 1994 published a book by the name of Produktion av allvar, which would translate into The Production of Seriousness. Here, he outlined a theory of economy that might be called non-denominationally anthropological, insofar as it presented the theory of economic behavior as a theory of human, cultural behaviour. Rather than being within the discipline of anthropology, it highlighted the necessity of understanding economic man as something other than homo œconomicus, and thereby extending the economic sciences into the field of a general social science.

This will be my starting point. But a starting point for what? My contention is that the discussions undertaken regarding management and economy in a post-industrial economy is hampered by how we understand the basis of economic action, and our way to ascribe lofty reasons for it. This essay thus discusses how the frivolous and the playful, dimensions traditionally placed at the margins or even outside economic logic, exist at the very core of what economy, understood as a system of meaningful exchanges, is. This is broadly synonymous with the project outlined by Claes Gustafsson, and might be seen as primarily a comment on it.

My interest, however, is most closely focused on a specific ordering of economic activity, one often referred to as managerialism. This refers to a way to look at economy that emphasizes the role of planning, control and steering, and has become a dominant perspective in its own right. Whereas economics (in any of its guises) studies the larger economic order, and consumption studies and marketing the interplay between offerings and consumption, management has become a catch-all for intentional, instrumental economic action. In my perspective, this includes the field of “organization studies”, so that the larger field can be referred to as management and organization studies. Management, as an activity, is usually comprehended as something that has at least a core of rational, functionalist logic: “In order to achieve X we must do Y”. This, however, posits that the aims of management, the end results of managerial action, are assumed to be taken-for-granted concepts, given truths a priori. This, as noted by Gustafsson, constitutes a metaphysics of economic reason, where notions such as ‘utility’ and ‘necessity’ play an important part. “In order to achieve X” means that this X, whatever it may be – an annual profit, the invasion of a country, a better mousetrap – remains unquestioned, as an accepted part of the equation. We could even call it the ideological form undergirding the very logic of the field. And inasmuch as it can be questioned, the answer is assumed to take on a similar form: “Why should we make a profit annually? Because this will enable us to serve our stakeholders.” And why should they be served? Because, because, because… There is always assumed to be a reason, an underlying logic that one can fall back on. And, at the micro-economic heart of business studies, this logic is thought to be one of utility, the fulfillment of needs, doing good.

2.
Although business is often derided as often unethical and having morals only when it suits other purposes, there exists a specific notion about the ethical underpinnings thereof, namely that business creates results that can be critically analyzed as being more or less useful and sensible. For instance, although some have criticized the market economy for creating side effects that are harmful – uneven distribution of wealth, ecological mishaps – such criticism has still usually implicitly accepted that there is a point to economy, a meaningful creation of useful things. Similarly, the apologists of the market economy usually point to all the “good things” that capitalism has created, often through the rhetoric device of “material well-being”. Both proponents and opponents of the market economy seem to agree that an economic system should strive to doing good, even though they are divided on the subject of what this means and what can be accepted on the way towards this goal.

Although any explanation that builds on polar opposites by necessity becomes a caricature, I can perhaps utilize this to illustrate my counter-position. Pro-market thinking, which dominates the field, commonly argue for their position by pointing out that the market economy creates valuable and useful things. Without the market economy, they say, we’d have less choice, fewer utilities, our needs would be met less adequately. To this those critical of the market economy might answer: “Yes, but do we really need all these things? We live in luxury, and destroy the planet while we’re at it.” Further, not all have those things we do, so there is a fundamental injustice to it all, when some have their needs met and some do not. We might learn to live with less, like those original economic men Marshall Sahlins (1972) described and who seem to have lead fairly nice lives – in the first essay, The Original Affluent Society, Sahlins shows how hunter-gatherers seem to have managed very well indeed, and instead of living in a state of desperate want had ample leisure time and the possibility to engage in an active social life. What is important to note, is that in this latter critique, the real point is missed. By applying a moral judgement to economy, an important analytic point is lost. Where one camp argues that the economy produces necessities, the other argues against the need for these. A very different way, the way suggested here, is to acknowledge the simple fact that although the market economy produces frivolities, unnecessary items, this needn’t be a problem.

Whereas those who would to the economy afford the marvelous and quite magical capability of transforming whatever is added to its machinery into precious and supremely useful commodities, one could reasonably be far more taken with the fact that people will, at great expense, purchase and consume a wide variety of things which to an outside observer (such as the famed Azande anthropologist) would seem almost inexplicably pointless. For instance, I have had the pleasure of working with a researcher (a student of Claes Gustafsson) who did work on the production of themepark attractions, and who memorably referred to the prime example of such, the rollercoaster, as a “machine for the transportation of human subjects in three dimensions so that the start and end points are the same”. Her somewhat sterile wording is of course important. A rollercoaster is a pointless machine, and has no useful purpose, as it does, in fact, merely transport its passengers back to the exact point they started. This, however, belies its importance. The enjoyment people can derive from one has nothing whatsoever to do with any imagined utility inherent in its use. Were we, for instance, to hear a person claim that she goes on rollercoasters for medical reasons we would normally react with suspicion or laughter. Instead, a machine such as this has to be understood as a frivolity, something which has meaning but no simple, singular utility.

This imagined critic might state that I thereby have shown that the economy is, in fact, a mistake. Much of what it does (most, in fact) has no real use-value, in Marx’s simple sense of the word. This seems wrong, to a lot of people. The spewing forth of an endless line of products no-one needs and the majority of people cannot afford seems like the result of a machine gone haywire, and this is de facto close to how the market economy is often viewed. In such a view, an error has been commited, and the machinery meant for useful production has been perverted into creating the pointless gor profit. Such theorizing can be found in a number of schools of thought, but perhaps most poignantly within the the writings of the Frankfurt School, i.e. within “Critical Theory”. What is interesting in such a critique is the way in which the meaning of economy becomes extremely similar within the two camps one would think would disagree over this very point. Both would, implicitly, view that there exists a correct developmental path for economy, one that would bring about both quantitative and qualitative improvements in the production and distribution of useful things. Thus, the critique against contemporary market economies usually hinge on the fact this process has been twisted by consumerism. Pro-market thinking will say that the market will choose wisely (as proven by improved standards of living), and anti-market thinking will argue the opposite. Both thus imagine that wisdom and prudence is at the heart of economy, and that the definition of these notions will serve to decide the issue.

The problem might be in a notion developed by the aforementioned Karl Marx, namely that of use-value. This concept is central to his thinking, and refers, simply put, to the usefulness of any given commodity. To Marx (any many others), this is the truest form of value, the way in which different things can be compared according to their usefulness. Drilling equipment has higher use-value than a hammer, partly because the former is a more complex construction and has thus taken more work to put together. Further, such equipment can be applied to more difficult tasks, i.e. its uses are more multifaceted. A hammer is more useful than a hairpin, for much the same reasons, and a toy has so little use-value that it is usually ignored completely. What Marx then notes is how exchange-value can pervert the natural order given by the categorization implied by use-value. Sometimes, depending on a number of factors, exchange-value becomes disattached from use-value, and this has many implications. This debate still rages on, in the sense that usefulness and utility are continuously either implicitly or explicitly referred to as natural and logical ways to view the true value of things. There is, however, a simple philosophical error that is often done in talking about these things. Use-value is here viewed as an essential aspect, a quality, of a thing, even though use, as a concept, is fluid and contextual. The notion of a natural and immutable use-value is, in fact, no more stringent than the idea that every hour has a specific economic value regardless of what one does with said hour. The notion of use-value is however one that Marx explicitly wants to exclude from discussions of economy:

The commodity itself appears as unity of two aspects. It is use value, i.e., object of the satisfaction of any system whatever of human needs. This is its material side, which the most disparate epochs of production may have in common, and whose examination therefore lies beyond political economy. (Marx 1858/1973, p. 881)

It is a strange statement, and Marx goes on to state that the very notion of use-value is presupposed generally and never really engaged with in a market economy, as the commodity-form of things forces people to relate to these through other forms of knowing than the assumedly pure category of use, specifically to their abstracted value in a system of exchanges. This abstraction, the exchange-value of the commodity is completely detached from the use of the object, and it is this specific form of extreme abstraction that enables capitalist logic to dominate that which Braudel referred to as the “material life”. With this in mind, it is interesting to note how Marx refers to use-value as something to exclude from political economy on the basis that it is too general a notion. Whereas the abstraction that is the exchange-value of the commodity form is assumedly both universal and treatable, the universality of the material form of need satisfaction “of any system whatever” is seemingly by Marx viewed as an anthropological matter. The use of an object is, in this way, the rudiment that Marx leaves unanalyzed.

A thing, any thing, obviously and by logical necessity has a number of uses. Although it is not true that anything can be done by any thing, almost everything can be done by a number of things and every thing can be used for a number of things. A mobile phone can be used to drive in a nail, even though it is less suited to this than a hammer is. A mobile phone can also, even within its core capabilities, be used in many ways. Its use-value as a way to call mom might be less than its use-value for phone-sex or vice versa, depending on how one actually, in a local context, uses a phone. For a lonely bachelor living with his parents in a rural community, the primary use of a phone, particularly one that can be easily transported to a more private surrounding, may well be for sexual entertainment. Calling mom and the ambulance are selling points (not to mention handy alibis), but not the main thing that gives the object use-value. The same may not (or may, as we really should not presuppose or moralize) hold for the identical mobile phone of his mother. It is thus difficult to say anything specific about an imagined true use of such a thing. We could instead say that things have multiple use-values, so that their value is less something within the object and more within the context they are conceived in. The use-value of an object is in such a view something that is created when an object is made meaningful. Turning away from the notion of a single, overarching notion of use, and replacing this with a view that emphazises how things are actually made meaningful and then used, value thus becomes a far less clear concept. The singular use-value of the aforementioned rollercoaster is almost impossible to deduct, since it has no real utility, no objective use. Still, as a decidedly pointless machine, it can be used in many ways – to titillate, to scare, to flirt on – that makes the use thereof meaningful. This difference in how we approach the word “use” is highly important.

3.
We know that Marx laughed, and that he in fact enjoyed a good joke and a beer (Wheen 2000). This laughter sometimes comes through in his texts, through wit and acerbic commentary on the economists he enjoyed to berate. It does, however, seem to have problems coming though in his theorizing. He is steadfastly and staunchly serious, even dour. The market economy he chronicles, through commodities, capital and flows, is one that for Marx seemingly is a reason unto itself. He can see how it works, but he rarely thinks about why. Why such a complex set of relations, such flows of energy and material? Marx senses that some are better at using this system than others, and spends the rest of his life thinking about this utilization, something that in the methodology of the social sciences has been described as asking “How?”-questions. But there is a “Why?” lodged deep within it all, namely the counterintuitive question: “Why do things have uses?”

This isn’t as obvious as it might first seem. Things, in themselves, are inert, material, still. A tree may grow, but we are not very likely to claim that the earth has the use-value of enabling a tree to grow (although e.g. Martin Heidegger might disagree). Particularly we are not very likely to see a tree as an agent using the earth (although e.g. Bruno Latour might disagree). An intelligent animal may use things to enact possibilities, such as when a ravenous bird realizes that a rock may be used to crack oysters. No longer a mere rock, this mass of minerals is now a oyster-cracking apparatus, with a corresponding use-value. Similarly, a stick may be used by a curious primate to extract some juicy ants or termites out of their nests, creating a useful culinary implement. Such tool-use may make us smile a bit, and this whole paragraph may seem slightly childish.

If one thinks about it, the fact that a stick or a rock can have a use-value is not that strange. They are material objects that can be used as tools. However, when they lay inert they do not look like the kind of things that would have use-value. Partially this is because they aren’t imbued with other kinds of economic value. No-one has made them (Let us, for the moment, leave God out of this), and they are abundant and thus without exchange-value. But this should not be a problem, at least not in Marx’s view. Use-value is not supposed to hinge on there being crystallized work in an object, and use-value is supposed to be the notion that exchange-value perverts, not a result thereof. Their use may not be apparent, and might even seem incidental, but a rock and a stick can, in a primitive sense, participate in value-creation and thus be useful. But how does this use come into being?

What happens when animals use tools is that they create them as meaningful. What has been a stick much as any other, one of millions and about as significant as a piece of gravel, gains in significance and meaning when it becomes a way to get a nice creepy-crawly snack, perhaps to the point that other apes get in on the idea. In the highfalutin language of business studies, an innovation has been made and an entrepreneurial ape has engaged in wealth-creation. Martin Heidegger, in one of his more easily penetrated analyses, has talked about the notion of Zeug, and how some things show us their true nature when we use them, in a physical sense.

This, in itself, is not surprising. What is surprising, however, is that specific uses have then achieved a kind of ideological right-of-way in defining value. Whereas uses that are geared towards uses deemed serious are automatically (even in the examples above) assumed to be value-generating, uses that veer towards the less easily explained, e.g. frivolous or playful ones are often ignored altogether. Yet, observing consumption patterns in the (post-)industrialized west, it becomes obvious that frivolity is a driving force. Take one of the runaway successes of the 1996 Christmas season, Tickle Me Elmo®. A furry anthropomorphic animal with tactile sensors that made it react to tickling, it became so sought-after that wily entrepreneurs could charge more than ten times its retail value for a copy. This, a toy with no other utility than the ability to react to tickling (and a non-toxic furry hide), became a huge profit leader in a segment known for fairly high margins. Or take WWE – World Wrestling Entertainment. A company whose main product consists of staged fights between muscled men in gaudy tights, it has (in April 2008) a global television presence, a complex matrix of tie-ins and a market capitalization of some 800 million euros. Or take Harry Potter, a fictional character, whose combined adventures have annihilated all sales records in the book industry and created billions of dollars in sales for the movie industry. To claim that these would represent marginal activities is obviously ignorant. Any marginalization of them must by necessity be of an ideological nature, a move by which specific activities are made invisible and others constructed as central by rhetorical devices rather than analysis.

A way to explain this would be to say that we are dealing with the perversion not of use-value, but of meaning-value. We are so accustomed to the discourse of the serious, that we normally assume that the category of use means that there must be some serious notion in the background, some notion of need or utility. But what we can see in the example of the ape poking into an anthill with a stick is not primarily the discovery of a way to fulfill a need, but a way to create meaning in the world. The stick takes on meaning first, and this is then translated into notions of utility. We could even say that Marx’s split between use-value and exchange-value suffers as it does not fully pay attention to this creation of meaning, this primary social fact. Claes Gustafsson referred to this as the metaphysics of economic thinking, the way in which we try to imbue the phenomena of the economic world with a seriousness that might in fact be alien to it, but which enters into it through the same creation of meaning that makes the category of utility and use possible to think.

Put somewhat differently, I contend that things do not have innate economic uses, but that these must be culturally created and curated. In addition, I follow Claes Gustafsson’s notion of a metaphysics of economic thinking in claiming that the same socio-cognitive process that enables things to have uses comes with a form of conceptual parasitism — the same mechanisms of thinking that allows for us to make things meaningful imbues them with a form of valuation that over-represents the category of seriousness. The reason why Marx’s laughter is difficult to fit into economic thinking would thus have less to do with any actual economic value of the frivolous, and more with the fact that economic thinking in itself is only capable of grasping part of economic logic.

4.
The astute reader will by now have found that the ideas brought forth here seem to bear a close resemblance to the way in which the idiosyncratic Georges Bataille discussed excess as a central aspect of a general economy. In his writings hereof, Bataille (1944/1999) always returned to the idea of loss and expenditure, and argued that the view of economy as dealing with conservation of energy and the accumulation of things was analytically incomplete. Instead, it was the wasteful, that which couldn’t belong to the logic of the limited economic that really developed the greater whole of the econo-cultural. Where the categories of use and necessity are comprehensible only within the more limited sense of the economic, the general economy builds on the way in which the world contains the potential for glorious excess. We build a world, from a situation where everyone had enough to eat and life was pleasant if not particularly exciting to a situation where it is completely possible to send people into space, wire every human being together in order to send dirty SMS-messages, and build a large hadron collider for 300 million euros. What glorious waste! What a marvelous expenditure of energies!

I now wish to talk of tulips. More specifically, I wish to talk of tulipomania (see Dash 2003). The crash of the dot.coms was, somewhat belatedly, often compared to the manic business conducted in tulipbulbs during a few of the golden years of the Dutch republic. The very fact that somebody, in 1637, had paid the equivalent of what a good carpenter made in wages in 15 years – 5200 guilders – for a single bulb of the tulip Admirael van Enkhuizen (a Violetten variety), makes it seem like the perfect case of market economy gone wrong. Normally, when tulipomania is referred to, it is consequently done as a word of warning, as a caution against “the madness of crowds”. The fact that tulipbulbs were sought after in this extreme manner is presented as a folly, as an incomprehensible stupidity conducted in an earlier and, assumedly, more irrational era. Similarly the prices paid for internet stocks during a few years of exuberant investing was later dissected as insanity, irrational behavior, and mania. But exactly where the borders between sensible expenditure and irrationality lies is hard to say. A few years after tulipomania burnt out, Rembrandt van Rijn was paid 1600 guilders for what is now known as his possibly greatest piece, The Night Watch. Obviously this piece is more permanent than a tulip bulb, although it might be slightly less useful (one can, if pressed, eat a tulip bulb). Yet very few commentators would claim that the price paid for it originally would constitute a folly. This is peculiar, for obviously there is little to say that art would be a more logical expenditure than flowers, even though the cost of developing e.g. one of Rembrandt’s finest pieces would arguably be somewhat higher than growing a rare tulip. But what we’re seeing here is not the appearance of an economic truth lodged in the essence of the painting, but rather the more mundane act of meaning-value shifting over time.

What was radical in Claes Gustafsson’s work was the fact that he highlighted this value, the value of Marx’s laughter, and showed that economic inquiry needs to pay heed to this. The production of seriousness that was his main area of research is not merely a conceptualization of how the history of ideas develop, but in fact a radical form of critique that problematizes the very thinking of economy. If we can no longer stand on the solid bedrock of “use”, a foundation upon which thinkers such as Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Joseph Schumpeter built their edifices, we need to find another way to undergird our theories of the economic. What Claes Gustafsson offered was not a essential foundation, eternal and solid, but rather a rhizome that needs to be constantly evaluated. This kind of seeking inquiry that looks for value in meanings rather than in the symptoms of these meanings is becoming increasingly important, particularly as business studies more generally is facing the fact that theories built on outmoded ideas of utility and necessity are being challenged by the inexorable march of the cultural economy – by which I obviously mean something far grander than merely the economy of operas and fashion.

The highlighting of frivolity is thus not a question of poking fun of more traditionalist views of the economy — even though such merrymaking can often be a pleasant addition — but a clear analytic move. By not only claiming that there are areas of the economic that the social sciences have ignored, but in effect showing that the very construction of the economic sciences is problematic, Claes Gustafsson managed to create a form of economic thinking all his own. The ramifications of this move cannot be fully analyzed as of yet, particularly as his work in not widely read outside of Scandinavia, but time is increasingly proving him right. What we can hope for is that the development towards a more anthropologically informed economic science will continue, and that we at some point will be able to analyze the production of seriousness in both all seriousness and with feelings of joy.

There needs to be laughter in the study of economic things. Not only because one needs to stay vigilant and not buy into dogma, but because both laughter and the economy are deeply human things. Without laughter, the world cannot be meaningful. And without meaning, there can be no economy. So we need to listen for the laughter, lest we become stupid. The boisterous laugh of Marx, echoing through history. The laughter of Claes at pompous claims of seriousness in the economic sciences. And the laughter we all carry within us, as proof that we are human, living, meaning-creating. The weird and wonderful laughter of the true homo economicus.

–

REFERENCES

Bataille, Georges (1944/1999) The Accursed Share. New York: Zone Books.
Dash, Mike (2003) Tulipomania. London: Phoenix.
Gustafsson, Claes (1994) Produktion av allvar. Stockholm: Nerenius & Santérus.
Marx, Karl (1858/1973) Grundrisse. London: Penguin.
Sahlins, Marshall (1972) Stone Age Economics. London: Aldine de Gruyter.
Wheen, Francis (2000) Karl Marx. London: Fourth Estate.

I’ve not kept my blogging up. The good part is that I have kept (at least some of) my writing up.

A lecture I did at ESBRI - Föreläsningsreferat (in Swedish).

The Village Bicycle’s Wednesday One-Liners:

Girl: I need to up my sex number. I either wanna sleep with a professor or a celebrity. (long pause) Wait! Professors are like celebrities!

–72nd and Amsterdam

Overheard by: Vincent

(Via Overheard in New York.)

One of the guys at orgtheory.net talking about his mac switch, rattling off his newly found benefits, ending with:

And, yes, Kieran, given the switch to a mac I do now ‘dress better, sparkle in conversation and [to my wife's chagrin I have] become more attractive to women and the envy of other men.’

(Via orgtheory.net.)

Just read the writer Rupert Smith on his lucrative porn-lit sideline, and couldn’t help but smile at this perfect image of our economic age. The serious author taking on a secret gay porn persona, and outsells himself…