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‘TABLE OF CONTENTS THE FIRST DAY: THE CREATION OF A FLAT WORLD THE SECOND DAY: PILLARS CRUMBLE, THE SKIES TUMBLE DOWN THE THIRD DAY: WHEN EVERYTHING BECAME FLUID THE FOURTH DAY: AND THEN THE PIRATES CAME ‘THE FIFTH DAY: MORALISM OF THE MASS MEDIA THE SIXTH DAY: ‘THE BIRTH OF THE CREATIVIST THE SEVENTH DAY: ‘THE BAN ON WORK IS LIFTED THE EIGHTH DAY THANKS BIBLIOGRAPHY PROLOGUE The magic word these days is ‘creativity’. And not just for artists: managers and policymakers alike demand creativity. Even family therapists and mediators urge Us to find more creative solutions. Nowadays, crea. tivity is all about positive morality. We expect nothing but good from it. But what remains of the meaning of the word when just about everybody is using it to death? And where does this hunger for creativity come from? Isn't it instead a sign of a creeping loss of true creativity? This essay primarily concerns itself with the Social context of creativity. The reader will find few, if any, references to trendy literature from either the world of management or that of popularized cognitive Psychology. Rather, the focal point is the economic, Political and social context in which this type of litera- ture operates and therefore ideological matters es well as labour sociology issues will be reviewed. The micro level (individuals), meso level (organizations) anc macro level (society in general) will all be properly represented, as befits sociology traditionally by now. The interaction between these levels will receive special attention. How, for instance, do macro socio- logical phenomena such as globalization and neo- liberalization intervene in classic institutions on a ‘meso level such as museums and art academies? Or, how do the global flows of money, goods and People affect creative workers and their creative labour on a micro level? will relate the story of the process of the social (relereation of creativity by taking you on an eight-day journey. The concept of creativity started to mutate in the 1970s. From a social point of view, however, the turnabout that has taken place since the end of the 1980s with the sweeping rise of the cultural economy and creative industry is especially interesting, and therefore the focus will be on the past two decades. All the same, we will be jumping back and forth through history and also treat periods from before the 1980s. For instance, it would be rather ill-mannered to say anything at all about the creative industry without referring at some point to the notion of ‘cultural industry’ introduced by Adorno and Horkheimer in the 1940s. Still, | do not pretend to present a careful historical genesis here, nor an etymological or semantic analysis. As mentioned earlier, the focus will be on the social narrative. In telling that story, however, very few classic sociological insights will be applied, although results from scientific research — including my own — will occasionally figure in the background. In accordance with the form of an essay, | will instead use metaphors from literature and especially philosophy to interpret and understand our social reality. In doing so, | will lean upon quite a few authors, some of whom | will use and others | will perhaps abuse in order to construct my own argument. Although their numbers run rather high in this regard, there are actually only three books that define the primary colour of this story. Two of these do so explicitly, whereas the ideas of the third book are more like a current in the background. However, as is often the case with figures behind the scenes, this last one may very well be the most, powerful actor. In hindsight anyway, book number ‘three has defined the global framework of this essay. The authors of the first two works are called Slavoj Zizek and Peter Sloterdijk, respectively. Although their ideological and intellectual positions are perhaps difficult to reconcile, they will meet each other quite frequently over the next eight days without crossing swords. Rather, an independent third stery ‘emerges from mixing First As Tragedy, Then As Farce (Zizek, 2009) and You Must Change Your Life (Sloterdijk, 2009). The reader absolutely does not need to be intimately acquainted with the wisdom of these gentlemen to be able to understand what follows, however. | should probably confess right away that | will also manipulate their work freely in order to ‘support my argument, the intention of which is Sawin mated. iseeainaeine read: For this manipulation | will use al of the weapons at my disposal, whether relevant or not. itis perhaps useful, though, to know a little bit about the protagonists in this story beforehand. Whereas the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek advocates an explicit neo-Marxist vision with a dose of Lacan, the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijkis. sometimes accused of ‘elitism’ However, itis hard to discern a clear political colour in his book You Must Ghange Your Life. By contrast, in First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, Zitek unremittingly advocates @ new communism. Inline with Marx's ideas about the course of history, he sees the 2001 terrorist attacks in the US as a tragedy, followed not even ten years later by a farce, i.e. the collapse of the financial markets. The political-economic landslide described by Zizek will be ‘the macro sociological context that frames the trans- formation of ereativity over the next eight days. In You Must Change Your Life, Sloterdijk in turn defends the thesis that people do not content themselves with life. as it is given. Frequent learning and obsessive prac- ticing offers them a way of rising above themselves. Itis no coincidence that Sloterdijk casts an admiring eye at the circus acrobat risking his life high on a rope. Creation requires specific and continuous practising within ‘vertical tensions’, according to the German philosopher. And this brings us to the third book, which has, as mentioned earlier, determined the plot of the following story of creation to a large degree, Alessandro Baricco also discusses verticality in | barbari (The Barbarians, 2008), contrasting it with the horizontality in which we are increasingly living today. Whether it is wine, football or the Internet, according to the Italian author, they all suffer from a loss of depth, stratification and expertise, but also of height and ‘grandeur’. The world has become flat, and it is hard to maintain an upright position. That is the central, thesis that | will defend in this essay. If creation once stood for standing upright and rising above oneself and others, what can creativity then still mean ina flat world? Although the main sources of inspiration for this essay sometimes wield rather abstract metaphors, every effort will be taken to make them concrete. In that sense, the signature remains sociological, always looking for empirical data or realities that are lived and experienced. There will be constant references, there- fore, to concrete examples and recognizable situations. Itis, however, inevitable that we must start at the only place there is to start. As we know, all creation is born in moments of complete chaos. Times and events that do not belong together, and even are at odds with each other, converge anyway. This generates confusion and perhaps fear, but certainly almost always irritation. As with every first day, this story too will throw the reader into the deep end unprepared. Its either sink ‘or swim. Only moments before the break of the second day will things start to clear up, Well then, hopefully you have now been sufficiently informed. To do more than that would be beyond a prologue's task, Pascal Gielen, Antwerp, May 2012. ‘THE FIRST DAY: THE CREATION OF A FLAT WORLD The historical facts are well-known by now. 1989: In Berlin a wall was torn down, while in Beijing a crowd, of students was struck down in and around Tienanmen ‘Square. The world would never be the same. Twelve years later, that fact was driven home once more. This time by an image that transcended all art in its sublimating aesthetics. Fear, tragedy and beauty are sublimely fused in a media image that is forever etched in our memories. When those two planes crashed into the towers of the World Trade Center, it looked as if Art had lost the battle for good. We felt ashamed to think that we could discern so much beauty in such @ degrading act of destruction, Or are we just as unscrupulous as the mass ‘media, who have desecrated the image by turning it into the ultimate commodity? It has been announced many times over the last century, but this time it is happening again and even more convincingly: Since 9/11, entertain- ‘ment has taken over art's monopoly on sublime images by way of ingenious choreography and a disgusting feeling for realism. Or, as Lawrence Lessig, the man behind Creative Commons, rather cynically states: The genius of this awful act of terrorism was that the delayed second attack was perfectly timed to assure that the whole world would be watching. These retellings had an increasingly familiar feel. There was music scored for the intermissions, and fancy graphics that flashed across the screen. There was a formula to interviews. There was ‘balance’, and serious- ness. This was news choreographed in the way we have increasingly come to expectit, ‘news as entertainment’, even if the entertain- ment is tragedy. (Lessig, 2004: 40) No artist can compete with media images anymore. The Belgian painter Luc Tuymans understood this powerlessness very well when, after these shocking ‘events, he submitted a monumentally large still life to Documenta XI. By harking back in an almost reactio- nary gesture to an icon of bourgeois contentment, he demonstrated the desperation of all makers of artistic images. The very size of the painting — too large to even fit in a bourgeois living room — seemed to predict the uncomfortable feelings of a class in utter decay. After 9/11, the art world is forced, once again, to think hard and long about its possibilities to still make a forceful impression; in short, to still be ‘performative’. Especially if that art still wishes to use classic images. The fall of the Wall, the Chinese students and the ‘Twin Towers were to have a less visible but all the more tangible successor in the financial meltdown of 2008. In contrast to the occurrences mentioned before, this particular event has not as yet ended. Its permanent character makes this event a paradoxical ‘one. Itis still generating a chronic ‘eventialization’ of both the economy and entire societies and their prevailing cultures. To refresh our memories: According to the classic American sociologist Erving Goffman, an event is an occurrence that replaces a familiar frame of reference and meaning with another one (Goffman, 1974). Itis a radical occurrence that changes reality as we know it. Something that has been there unnoticed for a long time suddenly crashes through the floor of reality, making everything that was real suddenly unreal, and everything that seemed fiction into a harsh reality. It can indeed take the wind out of us. An event generates new vectors of movement and points of orientation, and it can do this so thoroughly that it seems as if river's water suddenly becomes the riverbed and the riverbed becomes the current in the river. In 2008, this reversal didn’t take place just once, as is customary with events, but evolved into a permanent process, leaving not a single certainty from before intact. Even worse, each new certainty or rule has a high risk of being different again tomorrow, which makes it impossible to anticipate the consequences of one’s own choices. The World is Spinning (out of control) is an aptly named Dutch television show, but it could also serve as a euphemism for permanent crisis. The 9/11 tragedy is repeating itselt in the financial apocalypse, according to the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, this time as a farce (Zizek, 2009: 7-10). The Karl Marx- inspired choice of the word ‘farce’ is remarkably apt. After all, the financial crisis is based on a strong jonalization’ in which money became detached from matter (gold) and especially from labour and real economic production. This disconnection makes currencies and economic trends highly virtual, as they come to depend on abstract mathematical formulas. When monetary transactions become a form of abstract mathematics that hardly anyone understands anymore, this generates a high level of speculation or fiction. Investing becomes an artistic activity in which the collective faith upholds a highly virtual world, since markets are effectively based on beliefs (even beliefs about other people's beliefs), so when the media worry about ‘how the markets will react to the bail-out’, itis a question not only about its real consequences, but about the belief of the markets in the plan's efficacy. This is why the bail-out may work even if itis economically wrong-headed. (Zizek, 2009) It’s a story that is very reminiscent of an essay on the production of faith in the art world, in which the French cultural sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has pain- stakingly described how an artistic artefact is only created in the commentary on the commentary on the commentary on the work of art (Bourdieu, 1977) Whether the art world was the avant-garde in this field 00 is therefore an interesting question. Which was first: art or the financial markets? There is a remarkable likeness between the art world and the stock market anyway. They have something in common, especially when we look at both phenomena from the perspective of ‘faith’. What's more, the parallel tells us that the so-called ‘hard’ financial world is in effect founded on ‘soft’ cultural interpretations. Investing has always been a creative activity. However, as long as we are not convinced that investing belongs to the realm of fiction, itis capable of generating disastrous effects in reality; worse effects, anyway, than the belief or faith in art, Whereas in the art world the emphasis is shifting from production to exhibitions, the investment hysteria is guided by exhibitionism in the mass media. The painful part is that this hysteria is unrelated to real economic developments based on effective production processes and labour capacity, but that precisely because of this negation it does profoundly affect those. developments. And that is the other aspect of the farce Although even many neoliberals are beginning to severely doubt the viability of this late-capitalist system and are calling again for a stricter regulation of the market, the majority of them keep on trading asif in an irrational whirl of excitement. The fetish of balancing national budgets; the fight within the European Union over, or against, now Greece and later perhaps another country; the macho heroics of ratings; the appointment of troikas and what have yout it all serves to keea the financial world afloat like some global police-like force. At the same time, electorates are still happily Putting neoliberal and neo-national governments in Power, in the hope (or despair) of a reactionary restora- tion of better (or worse) capitalist times. Neoliberalism: the rule of the free market. Neo-nationalism: the nation state as the ultimate proprietor, the Republic of Property. Ironically, our reality is today determined by a highly virtual game controlled by the psychological whims of investors and an abstract carnival of banks. The irony is that reality, to a high degree, is determined by fiction. It is even beyond Jean Baudrillard’s dreams. Creative man has gone daringly far in creating a ficti- tious world to first believe in and then lose faith in, while continuing to act as if it’s real. This is hyper- reality dipped in deep cynicism: to go on acting according to the rules of the game while knowing that those rules are a far cry from reality. Today, it looks as if we need creativity again to step out of the imaginary cloud and regain some sense of reality. Characteristic of a cloud is that it mixes light 19 and darkness in such a way that is very hard to see ‘one’s way out of the cloud. Itis all misty, everything is neither white nor black; it’s all bluish grey. The distinc- tion between night and day has been removed and we seem to enter a phantasmatic world, like that of the Belgian artist Jan Fabre. We are permanently in a tran- sitional stage between night and day, in what Fabre. calls the ‘blue hour’, without knowing whether it will ever become light again. In other words, we don’t know anymore whether we are in the transition of night into day or day into night. It will take an enormous effort of the imagination to find the light switch and step out of this farce. And the effort required will have to be immeasurably strong, because the cloud in which we find ourselves is itself the very product of the most ingenious creativity. Bill Gates’ term ‘creative capi- talism’ doesn’t come out of the blue: he knows the tricks of the trade or the rules of the game like no other. With slogans about ‘authenticity’, imagination’, “(social) innovation’ and ‘flexibility’, kindred spirits such as Richard Florida encourage the creative industry to cough up even more fiction, to spray even more mist, because immaterial labour, symbolism and design are also easily taken into account economically. The imagi: nary world of creation and the virtual world of capital understand each other only too well. After all, both are nowadays residing on that same continent called fiction. What creativity do we need to be able to step out of that much creativity? The fall of the Berlin Wall, of the students in Beijing, of the Twin Towers in New York and the meltdown of the worldwide financial markets all have many and varied causes. The hunger for democracy, but perhaps even more for prosperity, in the formally divided Germany cannot be simply equated with the ast convulsions of authoritarian communism in China. And a terrorist attack in the United States is fundamentally different from the global financial crisis. But while these events are hardly comparable in terms of content, their formal likeness is remarkable and arouses curiosity. In all of these events, the central notion is ‘taking down’ The deliberate taking down of walls, people, towers and statues in recent history can perhaps metaphori- cally be regarded as a symptom of a similar shared fear: the fear of verticality. Both neoliberals and fossil communists are fearful of too ambitious heights and unfathomable depths. And although their ideologies are miles apart, they both believe in the economy as the foundation of society, However, those who pin themselves dewn on the economy understand nothing of cultural heights and other hierarchies, which is something we can hardly say about Muslims. Such a reproach would a‘ter all severely neglect their love of transcendence. What they are distrustful of, though, is secularised verticality or human ‘grandeur’, which they believe to be nothing but, shameless and inappropriate pretentiousness in the eyes of Allah or God. For the record, and before people start bashing each other's heads in, this is a worldview that Muslims share with all other monotheistic religions. Only the Protestants have ever seen a sign of God in worldly gains, which paradoxically forced them to exhibit more modesty, less pretentiousness, more mercantilism and more mediocrity. Whether religiously motivated or not, falling down and taking down make a up the visualized heart of the latest wave of globaliza- tion. Every worldly verticality — whether reaching for sublime heights or the darkest depths — is marked for destruction, In the current worldwide poker game in the global casino, everything and everyone is sucked onto the horizontal plane of the average. While sociolo- gists and other social scientists thought that the welfare state and its construction of the middle-class would lead to the necessary averaging, it is only now, with the run-down of the welfare system and the dismantling of the social centre, that we see the sanctity of the middle ground awaken. The economic ‘mean is now no longer linked to the cultural mean. r, rather: the dismantling of the economic mean in ‘the form of unheard-of financial wealth and excessive poverty does not generate a similar division in a cultural and intellectual sense. There, the average rules. With political-economic globalization (neo- liberalization) and technological globalization (the Internet), the greatest common denominator becomes the cultural standard. Flows of virtual money have the Power to reconcile different cultures in an increasingly easy way, relating them to each other and, in doing so, bringing them into perspective, sucking them onto the middle ground. Zizek argues that John Maynard Koynes was already aware of this in 1936 when he compared the stock market to @ beauty contest: Itis not a case of choosing those [faces] that, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those that average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. (Zizek, 2008) Let's stay with this notion of ‘anticipating’ for awhile, as it characterizes what is perhaps one of the most important activities in the flat world of networks. Individuals need to constantly anticipate the actions of other individuals and, in order to survive, organizations are obliged to constantly anticipate the movements in their alleged (market) environment. Strategy hes been replaced by tactics, and performativity by ‘adaptivity’. Anticipating, in other words, is the predominant action that pulls everything towards the middle. Over the past twenty years, the world has become increasingly flat. In a ‘networking’ world, depth — let alone historical depth — is hard to come by. And looking up will quickly lead to neck pain or inspire envy and jealousy sooner than admiration or respect. Networks, and especially financial configura- tions, naturally gravitate towards the horizontal level of the cultural middle. In spite of all the analyses of ‘global cities’, megapolises or metropolises, since the fall of New York itis the hinterland that now sets the tone. Since then, provincialism dictates the height of cultural ambition and we have entered the eta of mediocrity. Ever since we have been living there, we have all been given the same passport, issued by the United States of Normalcy. (Sloterdijk, 2011: 453) ‘THE SECOND DAY: PILLARS CRUMBLE, THE SKIES TUMBLE DOWN First Days are always slightly chaotic. Everything is, still so new. No routines have been established yet. Besides, all the events seem so contradictory that any attempt to bring them together may look grotesque, perhaps even implausible. Like most creations, that of the flat world also involves a lot of cracking and rumbling. The Second Day makes things a little bit clearer. Especially now that we can review what happened on the First Day from some distance. The story also becomes more concrete, now that we have dealt with the biggest macro-sociological events and metaphors. We can now leave that level behind and continue on the meso level, where the world no longer takes centre stage end we will be scrutinizing concrete actors. In the transition from a sphere-like world to a flat one, several actors come under pressure. They have to break their vertical suspension, transmute, or emigrate. As with every transition, itis no wonder that people panic and organizations are in crisis with this upheaval. One of the most remarkable actors to experience such an awkward predicament is the classic institution. To sociologists, institutions are always at least two things. On the one hand they are concrete build- ings, people and organizations, while on the other hand they represent a complex set of values, standards and customs that are upheld by a specific culture, Their social function indeed includes ‘holding up’, seeing as they were responsible for maintaining verticality in the pre-flat world, Institutions are the pillars that support the skies. Classic institutions such as the family, the church and the state, but museums and academies as well, all provide their own value regime in their own way. When the world was still round, they promised the inhabitants of various continents some measure of certainty and grip. As we know, they did this in a strictly hierarchical, sometimes very authoritarian but always vertical manner. A concrete example: The classic 18th-century museums provided depth by Presenting history, offered a stepladder by way of an exemplary canon and provided ‘grandeur’ to anyone exhibiting there, and even to those wandering around in them, The consecration of the actual work of art could only take place in relation to the deep wells of history. In art education, there was a similar hierarchical relationship between those who knew and those who did not (yet) know. The classic relationship between aster and pupil was a vertical one in which the place of law and authority was clear. The pupil had to climb the proverbial ladder and try to become the equal of his or her master. Only then did the ritual patricide become possible. But what is important here is that learning was climbing. Climbing the ladder of a rather self-assured wisdom. And aspiring students were only willing to do so if teachers had some ‘grandeur’ that earned them respect (even if this ‘grandeur’ was sometimes artificially upheld by the institutions that embedded them). At the same time, museums and art academies offered a yardstick for measuring creativity. ‘Teachers who felt that they discerned talent in a pupil not only relied on vast experience but also on @ healthy dose of intuition and subjectivity ~ especially when dealing with a modern artist. In other words, in the relationship between master and pupil there was also always an element of ‘not-knowing’ (Laermans, 2012). Pupils, on their part, had the necessary trust in everything the teacher did, wrote, drew and said, What is important here is that institutions such as museums and academies, in spite of thei: subjectivity and ‘not-knowing’, did erect a relatively objectifiable hierarchy of values. This hierarchy had little to do with the quantitative hierarchy of visitor numbers, number of competencies, output data and other evidence-based measurement material of the flat world. Creation and the potential for creativity simply do not lend themselves to being calculated or recorded in such a logic of numbers. On the contrary, having @ lot of money or public acclaim has in the past net always proven to be the best guarantee of creation and innovation. To create something means to place oneself outside of the measurable measure. Creative individuals must withdraw themselves from the flat plane and, by much trial and error, make themselves Stand upright. Classic institutions came in handy here because they, with their experience of depth, could somehow point the way up. All this navigating of Course carried no absolute guarantees for a successful result, but it did offer an adequate view of the horizon. ‘And perhaps it was precisely this concurrence of rigidity, history, ignorance and faith within the institu: tion that offered creativity its chances in the past, Without trying to romanticize their function — the history that institutions carry with them can also be crushing and the bureaucracy they embrace can be {00 rigid to allow for any rebellion or literal ‘uprising’ — one can safely say that classic institutions at least s:00d for a hierarchy of values that assessed and measured creativity differently from the way it is done in the. 2 Present dominant system of measuring investment and output. The latter reduces quality to quantity and irases the former in the process. Any numerical caley- lation makes differences in quality relative, after sl I" generates quantitative comparability and the inter: changeability of qualities by making an abstract fistinction in grades. Once the abstraction is made, "erally anything can be related to anything elee, and relationships therefore become relative and intey- changeable too. By contrast, rising up, or creating something, requires absolute faith and blind intuition, but also needs a solid cultural ground to stand on, Ard ‘hat is exactly what the classic institutions provided, Itis therefore rather bewildering that whereas the call for creativity has never been 0 loud as today, the ones making that appeal” are at the same time hastily draining dry an important layer of fertile coil that nourishes that creativity. For instance, after the 1989 Bologna Agreement, not only did the educational strane in Europe become highly uniform and rational, it was also redefined as a market space where educa: tional institutes fiercely compete for students, eutbide ding each other in offering easily interchangeable Tee potencies. Within this system, students are treated lke litle entrepreneurs, while the relationship between jeacher and pupil takes the form of a contract. Much has already been said elsewhere about the transmuta- tion of education (see, for instance, Masschelein and 01 Whetis remarkable is that this corps of authors includes ety Faw actual entrepraneurs but mowty meen aecountants, auditors, palcymaters anes Simons, 2006, and Gielen and De Bruyne, 2012). What matters here is that under the neoliberal hegemony, the institution is being eroded, One of the causes is that itis losing its own cultural hierarchy in the shadow of market logic. What was once regarded as highly functional for educating articulate citizens, creating ‘cultivated’ people, now fades into dysfunc. tionality under the dogma of profitability, And, as, Sloterdijk argues: because schools over the last few decades could no longer muster the courage to be dysfunctional — a courage they had continu- ally demonstrated ever since the seventeenth century ~ they became empty selfish systems, focused exclusively on the norms of their own operational management. They now produce teachers that are only reminis- cent of teachers, subjects that are only remi- niscent of subjects, students that are only reminiscent of students. At the same time, schools become ‘anti-authoritarian’ in an inferior way, without ceasing to exercise formal authority. (Sloterdijk, 2011: 447) The implementation of an anti-authoritarian educa- tional model does indeed run remarkably parallel to the introduction of a formal authoritarian neo- management model, which, as in other institutions, deconstructs the traditional cultural hierarchy of verticality by submitting it to the law of numerical measurability. According to Sloterdijk, the overturning of verticality into horizontality, and of book culture into 2 net culture, also generates a kind of controlled ‘jungle pedagogies’ within education whereby ‘interdisciplinarity’ is the buzzword that eradicates. all disciplines (and thus depth - ‘time to dig deep’, as Richard Sennett [2008] would say). We should not be fooled by these loud calls for professionalization. After all, in art schools these calls are often answered by inserting some marketing and management subjects, which inevitably leaves less time for teaching the proper creative subjects. As a result, students rapidly switch from one specific skill to @ completely different area of knowledge. Such jungle Pedagogies thus often have the opposite result of what was intended and result in the de-professionalization of the creative profession. The aim of all this is to deliver ‘broadly employable’ or ‘polyvalent’ students, multi-purpose individuals who follow just one impor- tant imperative: that of adaptation or — indeed — anticipation. ‘Adaptivity’ and ‘flexibility’ are after all the highest goods in a flat network world. The main thing is that such an educational model loses all Performativity. Educational institutes become organi- zations that no longer deliver a surplus of autonomous Personalities and idiosyncratic skills, for which society {and the economy) needs to generate new space. On the contrary, schools obligingly follow the demands of the market ‘to be more closely linked to the profes- sional practice’. However, as schools are always lagging behind in following these economic trends, and as it is also impossible to guess what the demands of a fluctuating labour market may be in five years’ time, education covers itself against such fluctuations by delivering multi-purpose subjects. Whether they are as characterless as traditional multi-purpose venues is best left an open question. The point is that by tuning into’ the market, schools lose all performativity (and authority} to make their own mark and therefore no longer provide a spine to those who wish to stand up straight and undertake some daring creative act ‘And what about museums, then? That is a more familiar story. Beginning in the 1970s, the function of the museum has slowly but surely been eroded by the rapid succession of temporary exhibitions and bien- nials, introducing @ structural amnesia in the field of art, causing it to suffer from a loss of depth (Gielen, 2009). Over the past few decades, the museum ‘unlearned its ability to hook up with the artistically most ambitious level of the previous generations’, again according to Sloterdijk (2011: 449). Paradoxically, the ideology of creativity has consistently fought the institution of the museum. If artists and other protago- nists of the institutional critique had been aware thirty years ago that they were undermining their own foun- dation for creativity, then perhaps they would have changed their tune completely. Or at least they would have chosen a better strategy. Still, such an analysis is Not altogether fair and correct. On the road of thair slow criticism (slow, as they were always starting from a very ambivalent attitude towards the museum they were afterall overtaken at high velocity by a speeding neoliberalization. It quickly found ways to profit rom the work done by the institutional critique by taking Over its jargon of ‘creativity’ (which would squash the museum), ‘innovation’ (which would slow the museum down) and ‘flexibility’ (which would make a the museum rigid). This takeover by neoliberalism took place ina rather ‘unseemly’ manner, and the ‘anti- institutionalists’ from before hardly even recognized it ‘anymore. Only the converts to neoliberalism — and there was no shortage of them in the 1990s — still saw some similarity between the creativity from before and the opportunism that now ruled. Mostly, however, the neoliberal engine has set a new operational framework in motion in the art world. Or rather, it deftly hitches a ride, even enhancing oper- ations that were initiated in the art world with the best intentions and much idealism. This of course refers to the hegemonial shift from the museum to the biennial and the symbolic displacement of the artist by the so-called ‘independent’ curator. Artists who still aim for immortality and who take up a position as bohe- mians outside of society, hoping for recognition in the hereafter, are today ridiculed for their conviction. Itis only the here and now that counts. Or rather, not the here and now, but the very near future on this flat, foundation. The artist can no longer stand outside of or above the world. Because many contemporary artists still regard creation as ‘standing upright’, rising above everyday things, they are summarily dismissed in the flat world. The creative worker of today is not so much a trapeze artist but more of a (social) networker. In the world of visual art, the latter coincides wonderfully well with the ‘independent’ curator mentioned earlier. He mingles with the audience, wanting both to show and be seen, Sloterdijk calls it the shift from ‘art as production power (including the ballast of the “great masters") to art as exhibition power’ (2011: 449). Its all less and less about creating and more about exhibiting In this exhibitionistic turn, it should hardly come as a surprise that the workshop or the atelier is lesing importance or that studios cease to exist (Davidts et al, 2009). In the flat world, this space of digging deep, of reflexivity and ‘slowness’ or verticality, but also of isolation and dealing with materiality, is predictaoly exchanged for an immaterial discourse that is all about mobility, and the institution dissolves in a network structure. ‘Mobilism’, ‘nomadism’, ‘travel’, ‘planetary drift, ‘exodus’, ‘transport, ‘links’, ‘chains’, ‘loops’, ‘neurons’, ‘in touch’, ‘relational’, ‘connection’, ‘communication’, ‘distribution’, ‘redistribution’ are but @ handful of notions used by curators and a growing horde of creative workers to describe and sell their activities. While curators — both in their exhibiticns and in general — pour out criticism of the perverse excrescences of late capitalism by the bucket load, the majority of people in the art world dance perfectly in time to the tune of the neoliberal climate. This lack of self reflexivity — at least publicly — is quite remarkable. The same goes for the notion of the rhizome or that of the network. Itis usually embraced, and endowed with a romantic touch. The hero of network thinking is of course the nomad, which again emphasizes the rosy side of mobile man. This nomad, however, is not a strider but a swimmer - and one with gills, if we are to believe the Italian author Allessandro Barrico (201). ‘THE THIRD DAY: WHEN EVERYTHING BECAME FLUID Mobility and networking are today pert of the art world’s doctrine, and in fact that of the entire world of professionals. Artists who stay at home in their studios are morally reprehended and accused of localism. They nourish false illusions on an island where they still have solid ground beneath their feet. But nowadays artists are either international or they are nobodies. Curators are connected or they are nobodies. These may sound like the ground rules of the contemporary art world, but they are also the adages of global late capitalism, which has, over the past few decades, effortlessly invaded the artistic realm through cultural and creative industrialization. This late capitalism, by the way, has a lot to gain from us seeing ourselves as mobile actors in a fluid networked world. Individuals 28s well as organizations feel that their true selves are ‘corporate identities on the open sea’, as Sloterdijk says in his writings about globalization (2006: 90). Time, labour, and even love become liquid if we are to believe Zygmunt Bauman (2009). So, those who imagined that they still had solid ground beneath their feet when the flat world was created were very much mistaken. The flat world is a wet one. It is one big pool of H20 in which we paddle around as if on water bikes. Or, to put it more patheti- cally, we are floating in a swimming pool, treading water in an airless, liquid, late-modern age, hoping to find some sort of direction (or meaning). Whereas collective institutions — the welfare state prominent among them — used to guarantee the stability of the cruise ship on the open ocean, today our living and working environment is made up mainly of rubber rings floating about with the occasional small lifeboat 8 and a limited number of luxury yachts thrown in. This is especially true of creative working envi- ronments. Creative workers have been thrown into deep existential waters with treacherous currents. ‘Therapists, personal coaches and other social-psycho- logical workers are supposed to help us get used to our new living environment. This mental support force is entrusted with the noble task of relieving entrepre- neurial creative people from their fear of drowning, ‘Those who still think that they can rely on the tradi- tional ground that institutions used to offer are merely delusional. With no clear idea of the future, creative individuals are bouncing from one wave to the other and have no choice but to practice freestyle swimming. Occasionally they may find a precarious rubber ring to keep their head just above water, but the crestive entre- preneurs have to inflate it themselves and the slightest puncture will burst it wide open. Hopefully, the double wall of the insurance policy will then keep them afloat, for a little while longer. In a flat world with neither God nor secular collective solidarity structures, these entre- preneurs are indeed very much left to their own devices. This ‘immanism’ of liberal representative democ- racy, as the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy calls it (1991), regards society as the sum of independent individuals, who are finding it increasingly difficult to forge relational ties. A flat, wet world that looks upon itself as a network presupposes quite specific charac- teristics and makes certain demands of the people who are floating about in it. In a neutral definition, a network consists of interconnected points. It can only exist because there are connections, as we know from the actor-network theory. When those connections are broken, the rhizome evaporates with them. The word ‘evaporate’ clearly indicates the weakness of a network configuration within a wet playing field and evokes the volatile or at least temporary nature of such social ‘connections. What's more, within a liberal netwcrk economy these temporary collaborations are controlled by competition. This is why project-like thinking is so dominant in the current order. People only temporarily drift together, to then float collectively while realizing a project, after which their swimming lanes often diverge again. Relationships arise because there is a collective goal for a short while. This is why sociologists call this goal-instrumental action. This thinking in terms of networks and projects is not limited to the field of creative labour but has become part of society in general. Nowadays, for instance, project developers determine to a large extent the look of our cities and living environments, and even the nuclear family is seen as a temporary educational project for children, at the conclusion of which parents can go swim their separate ways again. The best functioning units within wet networks are not collectives or large, unwieldy cruise ships. It is not unions, social classes, groups, political parties, institutions or families that set the course, but entre- preneurial individuals - even in their rubber rings. The maximum collective unit that matters is the team, precisely because in a team all members can be called to account for their individual responsibility and effort. Individuals are more flexible, more mobile, slicker, wetter and more ‘adaptive’ than rigid collective struc- tures on dry land, and that makes them very suitable for the water society. Itis also why ‘independent” curators have a better market position in today’s industrialized art world than do collective museum structures with their local artistic, political, social and economic embedding and historical and art-historical obligations. One of the reasons is that the ‘independent’ curator can provide the manoeuvrability of a speed- boat, whereas institutions are as unwieldy as. mammoth tankers. Just like an entrepreneur, this player stays dynamic by constantly keeping a watchful eye on the potential competition from other curators and fluently anticipating it. The curating boom with its worldwide culture of selection and contests fuels this competitive mood even more. Just like independent entrepreneurs, curators who wish to keep their heads above water take their destiny into their own hands, never give up and respond with a problem-solving attitude to every new challenge that the surrounding oceans throw at them. Indeed, in the flat wet world, creativity is often equated with ‘problem-solving’, which is something else entirely than causing problems or, rather, problematizing issues, a task that was until recently reserved for the artist or dabbler, The new protagonists, by contrast, see them- selves as entrepreneurs. This is something entirely different from seeing oneself as a critical citizen of a nation or as a public servant with an institution. The former, after all, is a liberal-economic entity, while the latter is a liberal-political identity. This means, among other things, that citizens and public servants simply have rights and obligations (given to them because they were born in a certain country or occupy a certain position with an institution.) Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are obliged to constantly obtain and defend those rights and obligations time and again within the organization, city, region or nation where they find themselves. Coldwater fish adapt their temperature to that of the waters in which they swim. This requires, among other things, flexible, dynamic, active, communicative and performative networking In short, in a sea of opportunities, the independent entrepreneur is permanently forced to prevail over his connections. Over the past two decades, the art world has inereas- ingly come to define itself as part of the network society outlined above. It should be no wonder, therefore, that a lot of the jargon mentioned here can be found in today’s exhibition catalogues. The word ‘network’ is ubiquitous and the careers of curators and artists are treated like a succession of temporary projects. Museums and biennials, as well as the cultural cities in which they operate and produce, also define themselves as enterprises competing with each other for artistic, political and economic prestige. Their symbolic weight is reflected in visitor numbers, audits and other measurements, and their potential for creativity is expressed in this quantifying logic 2s well. In other words, creativity is transmuted into ‘tu-creativity’ A view of society that is based on enterprising individuals, organizations and cities or regions on a flat level stresses certain qualities or values, such as individual freedom and self-reliance. Other qualities or values, though, are hopelessly neglected. The enter- prising individual has little use for solidarity, for one thing. Or, as Sennett states in his line of thinking: 2 ‘Networks and teams weaken character... character a8 a connection to the world, as being necessary for others’ (1998: 146). Within the network society, soli- darity is only temporarily functional, usually only for ‘the duration of a project. In other words, in the network economy this value, too, is seen as goal instrumental. {tis only valid as long as it benefits enterprising indi- viduals and fits within their trajectory. One of the consequences is that these individuals find themselves in 2 very weak position when something happens to them, as it becomes increasingly harder to fall back on collective structures of solidarity. That is also true for the art world and by extension for the entire creative industry. Take for instance the fact that there is remark- ably litle social security in this sector, Trade unions are greeted with howls of derision, which partly explains their lack of clout. Worldwide, the creative sector, including the art world, seems to be cultivating a labour ethics these days that plays right into the hands of the neoliberals. Another problem of this flat wet world is sustain- ability. The demolition of the institution not only leads to cultural amnesia but also generates social insta- bility. Individuals and organizations that are perma- ently open to change and to constantly new connec- tions and constantly new artistic movements and creative trends have problems with building durable relationships. This goes for both the relationships of individual creative workers and those of organizations. Constantly changing projects result in at most tempo- rary commitments. Also, constantly working within the framework of projects means only temporary labour Contracts or, as is often the case in the creative field, No contracts at all. In other words, a network economy isnot really conducive for durable labour relationships and labour conditions. In the history of labour, the job held for life is now definitely a thing of the past, especially in the creative industry. Creative people, by the way, often speak derogatively of ‘steady jobs’ or ‘permanent positions’, preferring their own autonomy to the security of a steady job. The creative work ethic is against commitment to the rigid demands of an institution. By contrast, the project-based labour embraced by the cultural and creative industry happily welcomes the continually changing contacts and contracts Finally, the project-like character of a flat world makes it very sensitive to fashion or trends. Information quickly circulates on a global scale and competition is fierce, leading to quick changes of the creative guard. As each project has to bring about a Clear and preferably remarkable creative distinction in the relatively short term, there is often little space left for self reflection or for research and development. This ultimately undermines the sustainability of the Creative production itself. Creativity often stops at Superficial creation, mere differentiation with neither depth nor height. In the wet, flat network world, creative individuals swim hastily and blindly from one project to the next. Whether they will be able in the long run to ‘keep the ball in the air and the game alive’, as, Nicolas Bourriaud, one of the protagonists of the new flat art world says (2009), remains very much to be seen. Unless of course he is talking about an entirely different baligame. Itwould be too simplistic to condemn the network a & idea as a purely ideological concept. Within the present-day economy, however, itis increasingly being appropriated and deployed to serve the neoliberal hegemony. This is certainly true for labour relations, but also for the reorganization of education, the media, politics and relationships in the creative world Also, the whole network discourse is instrumental in completely redrawing the lines between the public domain, the labour sphere and the domestic sphere. To use the network concept as a purely neutral or descriptive term, as Bruno Latour does in his ethno- graphic work, or to flirt with it — often accompanied by some choice phrases by Gilles Deleuze — as happens in the art world, is to ignore or suppress the ideological appropriation of the notion of networking. It can only lead to sticking one’s head in the sand, Therefore, we can only understand the labour of the workers in the present-day cultural world and creative industry if we have some grasp of the dominating relationships of production within the current flat, wet world. Not that this is a very original insight, as it was already put forward by Walter Benjamin over half a century ago. In his essay on authorship, he came up with the unexpected postulation that the author could only be understood as a producer within the relation- ships of the fourth estate, or mass media as we would call it today. And, he concluded They still belong to capital. On the one hand the newspaper, on the technical level, repre- sents the most important literary position, But this position is on the other hand in the control of our opponents, so it should not be surprising that the writer's comprehension of, his dependent social position, of his technical possibilities and of his political tasks must struggle against enormous difficulties. (Benjamin, 1970: 3) And is this not also true today of that new protagonist in the world of visual art, the ‘independent’ curator, but this time in relation to ‘the art market’ and ‘global capitalism’? And, in line with Benjamin‘s thinking, shouldn't we conclude that this curator’s present-day catalogue activism only remains ‘counterrevolutionary’ if his or her solidarity with the artist, the creative ‘precariat’ and some misery in the world is purely ideological? ‘As mentioned earlier, the current context of production by creative entrepreneurs is characterized by a high degree of individualizetion or de-collectivization of project work in a fluent network structure. The ambiance of this production context and the always youthful enthusiasm with which it is embraced, and even ‘scientifically legitimized” under the guise of individual independence, makes the creative industry especially sensitive to neoliberal value regime. Those ideas cater to the desire of cultural producers to act autonomously, in full freedom. Creative capitalism of course tells its protagonists that they are, or at least should be, in control of their own lives and working conditions. It is their moral obligation. in exchange for this opportunity for self-regulation, the creative indi- vidual is prepared to offer his virtuosity cheaply, and mes even for free. The desire for autonomy, fuelled by the neoliberal appeal for realism and ‘personal responsibility’, eventually leads to ‘self- Precarization’. Creative entrepreneurs take risks and neglect institutional securities (disability insurance, Pension funds, etcetera), believing they can take care of these things themselves, Within these parameters, work offers the experience of a unique chance for self-realization, and that is exactly why labour is easily offered at low rates. In their urge to realization, entre- preneurs take up a sensible or realistic position in order to obtain their goals efficiently. In this secular- ized religion of ‘self-realism’, itis no coincidence that the root word ‘real’ fits in well with neoliberalism’s call for more realism and the neo-manager’s watchfulness over the realizability or feasibility of a proposed Project. Utopia is out of the question in this ideology of realism. Worse still, whatever cannot be measured is soon set aside as impracticable and too utopian. The urgent call for an awareness of reality obliterates the breathing space for an awareness of what is Possible. Entrepreneurs, who are themselves the employers of their own labour, regard the realization of their objectives as real, and in the process realize themselves. However, the belief in ‘self-realism’ often gets these employers/employees into trouble. Political scientist Isabell Lorey has outlined the ambivalent situation into which these cultural and creative entrepreneurs manoeuvre themselves: This financing of one's own creative output, enforced and yet opted for at the same time, constantly supports and reproduces the very Conditions in which one suffers and which one at the same time wants to take part of. Itis perhaps because of this that creative workers, these voluntary precarized virtu- 0808, are subjects so easily exploited; they seem able to tolerate their living and working conditions with infinite patience because of the belief in their own freedoms and autono- mies, and because of the fantasies of self- realization. In a neoliberal context, they are 80 exploitable that, now, itis no longer just the state that presents them as role models. for new modes of living and working. (Lorey, 2011: 87) Paradoxically, because of their self-declared autonomy, creative individuals become highly dependent upon @ network environment that is always fickle and find themselves drifting towards a sociologics of competing entrepreneurs. Just like these protagonists of the neoliberal network economy, creative individuals constantly have to rely on self-promotion within an attention regime in order to stay connected or extend their network. This generates a production context and relationships between creative workers that leave their mark on both their attitudes and their products To illustrate this within the limited space of this essay, the focus will be on only one — albeit crucial — Production aspect in the flat world: project work. Just as in the rest of society, projects have taken on a central role in creative production. In the traditional art world, for instance, temporary exhibitions, biennials and triennials have won historical ground from the structural museum sector — which, by the way, 45 has been thinking more and more in terms of projects itself. Especially in a network society, projects are therefore a cherished method of production and a temporary binding agent, say the French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello. The project is the occasion and reason for the connection. It temporarily assembles a very disparate group of people, and presents itself as a highly activated section of network for a period of time that is relatively short, but allows for the construction of more enduring links that will be put on hold but remain available... the very nature of this type of project is to have a beginning and an end, projects succeed and take over from one another, reconstructing work groups or teams in accordance with priorities or need (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2008: 104-105) ‘As mentioned earlier, project work does generate goal-instrumental relationships that are dissolved again when the project is finalized. In the case of creative workers, they enter into temporary strategic alliances with artists, designers, art works, sponsors, creative organizations, etc. Once the creative project is finished, the relationships are put on hold. They are ended but can potentially be reactivated. They are sort of suspended, Projects have a special economic value because their temporariness allows them to always succeed in bringing together a lot of energy, manpower and working hours. Those who collaborate on a project tend to give it everything they've got. At the least, they are willing to invest more time and energy than initially expected or predicted. Precisely because they know it will end someday, they are willing to sacrifice private time, perhaps pull an all-nighter, or at least work long hours. This is in part because creative project work is always result oriented labour and the result is the only thing people are accountable fer. Always having insufficient means at their disposal, they are still willing to go to extremes. So, working on projects does indeed lead to more productivity and creativity, but at the same time itis a convenient labour model for mental, social and physical exploitation. In the excitement of the project, the participants imagine ‘themselves to have found heaven on earth, as thare seems to be no end to the creativity produced by the newly found collectiveness, But those who go from. project to project will learn that this way of working feeds on intellectual and physical stamina and inthe long run leads to exhaustion. The project squeezas you out. Not that working on projects was necessarily invented by the cultural and creative industries, Within the art world it is a way of working with a well estab- lished tradition. The traditional museum curator would for instance organize exhibitions that had a beginning and an end and that also temporarily brought together artists, art works, critics, collectors and perhaps a few additional sponsors. The big difference with regard to present-day individual creative workers is that their artistic projects are no longer embedded within the institution in terms of job security. As a result, acquiring a project and making it successful is directly a linked to their symbolic status and economic situation. Just as the project is temporary, their income and contract — if there is one — are only temporary as well. And when on top of that their creative labour is relatively underpaid — which after all is often the case — they are constantly obliged to look for new projects while still realizing the current project. In other words, creative entrepreneurs are mentally always living in another world than the here and now. They are swimming outside of the present in an ocean of potential future projects. The German philosopher Boris Groys has this to say about it Each project is above all the declaration of another, new future that is supposed to come about once the project has been executed. Hone has a project — or more precisely, is living in a project — one always is already in the future. One is working on something that (still) cannot be shown to others, that remains concealed and incommunicable. The project allows one to emigrate from the present into a virtual future, thereby causing a temporal rupture between oneself and everyone else, for they have not yet arrived in this future and are still waiting for the future to happen. (Groys, 2002) Socially, this often leads to frustration with managers, project leaders, technicians and other co-workers involved. While they are perhaps still physically working together with the creative project worker, he or she has mentally already sailed out onto the waters of the future, Symptoms such as bad or no communication, limited or even faked commitment, but also physical absence may sometimes be reported by the temporary allies, but the problems are rarely solved. Like all project workers, creative entrepreneurs literally lack routine: they escape the rhythm of the day, the prasent in which they operate. Consequently, they often con’t notice the rhythm of the immediate environment and the people they are working with. This makes creative entrepreneurs loners, always looking for other waters ina future elsewhere, scouting out new and perhaps better and bigger projects. The project as a temporary junction within a network leads to curious social configurations. Not so ‘much because the network figuration is goal instru- ‘mental and therefore the social aspect isin itself only @ means to an end; after all, the realization of a creative project or concept, not the mutual relationship, is the main thing. The main reason why project work gener- ates a curious social configuration is that the goal that is being realized by a collective of co-workers is already floating about somewhere else for at least one of these co-workers: the creative hireling. Because of this shift, the project's goal is always already situated outside of the project, that is, in a new project. From a sociological point of view, this leads to special forms of social cohesion. This cohesion benefits those who realize the project (technicians, administrative workers, PR people, etc.) but rarely benefits the initiator, the actually creative individual involved in the project. The latter finds himself outside of his project, whizh makes him lonesome, as mentioned earlier. For the project's author, namely, everything in the here and now is of no consequence since he is already living in the future and views the present as something that has to be overcome, abolished or at least changed, This is why he sees no reason why he should justify himself to, or communicate with the present. (Groys, 2002) Groys is however not talking about the material causes of this apathy with regard to the present. Ifthe next Project is not only necessary for creative satisfaction but also simply to put food on the table, this will only fuel future-escapism. In the ocean of projects, commitment will there- fore always be only temporary and pertial. This is not only s0 for those who realize a project but also for the environment ~ the city, the neighbourhood, the insti- tute, the public, the creative community or migrant community, the ecosystem — in which it takes place and even for the idealism, if that plays a part. Nomadic creative entrepreneurs are not only physically flexible, but socially and mentally as well. While relying on their intuition and talent, they are constantly scanning the world for useful ideas, new artists or creative hotbeds. Just lke instinctive entrepreneurs, the new creative workers are always accompanied by disorder, a perma nent state of being alert and doubtful at the same time. Within these flowing situations, they accumulate specialized, creative and highly personalized know- edge. This personally integrated knowledge has the advantage of being very mobile and flexibly deploy- able. Its downside is that itis much harder to embed historically or institutionalize. After all, network relationships do not easily build a memory. Any ‘commitment to either local circumstances or history can only be temporary, as it would otherwise threaten independence and personal freedom. And that would be detrimental to the myth of self-realization. Put in abstract terms, creative entrepreneurs are thus placed very flexibly in both the time ard space that might tie them down. The symbolic and economic benefits of weak and easily exchangeable ties is however counterbalanced by a lack of faith in, and loyalty to, the same local circumstances and history. The individual who is permanently mentally and physically mobile thereby loses his or her character or ‘sustainable Self’, according to Sennett (1998). In the romantic embrace of an ocean of bohemians, nomads, networks and projects, this sacrifice to flexible crea- tivity is conveniently forgotten. In short, the de-institu- tionalization of creativity not only cuts away depth and height, but also durable character building. Putsimply, creativity becomes disengaged from faith or convic~ tion. Defending a creative idea is relative and only temporarily relevant. For the duration of the project, and for as long as the environment wants it, such an old-fashioned positioning may be productive, but after that it becomes irritating and something to get rid of. In other words, the creative worker no longer has to take up a position. Or rather, he is no longer obliged to hold a position. Whereas round world ethics, for the sake of credibility, still demanded some constarcy (as a sign of authenticity), the flat world demands pure mobility and flexible anticipation. If they are truly creative, creative entrepreneurs will after all easily exchange older ideas for new ones. In other words, project workers had better be disengaged or alienated from their own creative products in advance. As a verb, ‘networking’ always implies some form of self- effacing. It blocks taking root. Rhizomes are indeed not roots. In the flat wet world, being ‘grounded’ is equated with ‘nostalgia’, ‘rigidity’, ‘inflexibility’ and sometimes even plainly with ‘fundamentalism’. The neoliberal constitution, in other words, demands creativity for the sake of creativity, mobility for the sake of mobility, fluidity for the sake of fluidity, change for the sake of change. This tendency towards an always moving ground also explains the increase in change management in larger institutions. It installs the ideology of change because change as such is supposed to be a good thing. In the flat wet world, innovation is morally Positive by definition. That many organizational restructurings seem pointless and later turn out to be so, and that the endless chain of ‘creative’ changes often results in a status quo on the work floor, is a fact that many employees are by now wise to. The rank and file have long since figured out that this neophilia primarily serves to keep the neo-managers themselves firmly in the saddle, as every newly announced change legitimizes their own survival. Whereas creative indi- viduals come and go, anyone who is good at meas- uring and counting stays on. After all, creativity must be flexibly deployable, devoid of any ardent belief, ideology or conviction. The creative deed must be depoliticized, in other words. Creation and innovation, that is the message, and the flat wet world provides the medium for that message. The message becomes the massage, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, and the call for creativity becomes a sedative. Or, as Sloterdijk puts it with some pathos: ‘the present-day network society celebrates the human right to unconscicus- ness’ (2011: 395). However, such statements quickly tend to sound bombastic in the flat world, where any form of critical creativity, upright standing or verticality causes irritation. With an appeal to constructive collaboration, critical analyses are quickly dismissed as grotesque blow-ups or extravagant exaggerations. Preferably, within the current neophilia, they are shoved aside as ‘obsolete’, ‘has-been’ or even ‘reactionary’. - ‘THE FOURTH DAY: AND THEN THE PIRATES CAME In the flat world, creativity has lost its familiar param- eters. Classic institutions such as educational institutes ‘and museums are providing these parameters less, and less. Therefore, enterprising individuals must be increasingly self-reliant, even though they sometimes, get help from the team of which they are only tempo- rary members for the duration of a project. The posh label of ‘entrepreneur’ is however often covering up a precarious existence in which self-realization and self-sacrifice become confused. In the Netherlands, anyway, the so-called ZZP status (for self-employed workers without employees) often serves as a disguise for what is in fact an unemployment status. When collective institutions offer less and less guarantees, both in terms of social security and in terms of cultural yardsticks, individuals have to turn to other pleces that can nourish both them and their creativity. In the flat wet world, the search for such islands has therefore begun in earnest. In the recent past, this expedition has rediscovered a few small stretches of land that had perhaps disappeared below sea level for a while. Because of their recent undersea existence, they still look very squidgy and unstable, Those who dare stand on these sandbanks still run the risk of getting their feet wet and of sinking quickly in the mire of a hopeless individuel tangle. These islands certainly don't provide a stable foundation, as did the traditional institutions. What's more, these emerging grounds are quickly threatened again, as the proponents of cultural horizontality are very suspicious of them. You never know, someone might stand up here. They therefore hope, armed with greenhouse effects and similar ecological or other weapons, to raise the sea level a 55 little more so that preferably nothing can surface ‘anymore. But as long as the hoped-for definite flood does not occur and this type of danger spot continues to rise, other pesticides are called for. Whoever dares. to crawl ashore is thus hastily branded as ‘illegal’ or a ‘pirate’. In light of their self-declared ‘state of exception’, the horizontals want everyone to stay in the water (see also Agamben, 2005). Both the financial police and other number crunchers hope to keep everything on a flat plane. Anything that is not measurable or cannot be immedi- ately economically accounted for simply has no right to exist and is therefore efficiently placed outside of the law. Anyone or anything that is not measurable, is outlawed. In light of the structural nature of the financial meltdown mentioned earlier, the state of exception is given a permanent legal statute as well Rules are suspended and replaced with temporary ‘measures’. These are rules designed to the measure of constantly occurring crisis situations and they can also be changed time and again. Measures are first and foremost intended to enforce the measure, but also to be able to flexibly adapt the unit of measurement. And it's not just the prevalent ‘change manage- ment’; the entire government policy, too, uses less and less legislation and regulation and more and more ‘measures. For instance, Europe's dictate to Greece to include the obligation of a balanced budget in its. Constitution is in fact an intervention that insists on melting the constitution, the ground law, into a wet, and fluid mass. It forces the state to make its own legislation liquid. The constitution is made subservient to any wild market fluctuations, reducing the law and Tules to an accounting unit. This is indeed a ‘measure’ that sets the norm, time and again, in the permanent state of emergency. In the name of that same emer- gency it becomes permissible to torture people, throw fugitives into the sea, demolish social security, deny the sick access to healthcare, turn back democracy in ‘education and do away with subsidies for culture. All of these fall outside of the measurable ‘measure’ of neoliberalism, which shifts all responsibility to floating individuals in order to minimize its own risk. This system explains why neoliberalism generates a large carousel in which the buck is for ever passed on. In spite of this threat-by-measure, a growing minority is still setting course for the islands. Some among them even dare to pitch their tents there. Tre verticality of their tent poles by no means matches that of the traditional institutional pillars. Still, although lacking sound foundations, the scarce land is regularly occupied. Some intellectuals and other verticals have even named it, if only to establish its existence at l2ast in the discourse. The philosophers Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, for instance, have called these islands the ‘common’ (2008). In terms of a creative seedbed, the jurist Lawrence Lessig named them ‘creative commons’ (2004). Leaning heavily on the idea of, ‘general intellect’ from good old Marx, these verticals regard the common as a possible substitute for the institutions of the pre-flat world. Various publishers, authors, musicians, web designers and other creative individuals today subscribe to the principle of the ‘creative commons’, which allows users of their cultural Products to copy, distribute and even transmute them 2a long as it is for non-commercial use. Creative products and forms of expression thus become, to a certain extent and under certain condi- tions, a free ‘open source’ that can be used for new creative productions. Hence the term ‘creative commons’: cultural and mostly immaterial goods that are freely available to anyone because copyright and proprietary rights are pertially lifted. According to some verticals, including Hardt and Negri (2008), such a ‘common’ is necessary to guarantee future creative production. In light of the Precarious situation of institutions, mentioned earlier, they may be right. Still, the statute of the common is Not the same as that of the traditional institutions. The philosophers described the common as a category that transcends the classic contradiction between the public good (usually guaranteed by the state and other institutions) and private property: By the common we mean, first of all, the ‘common wealth of the material world — the air, the water, the fruits of the soil, and all nature’s bounty — which in classic European Political texts is often claimed to be the inher- itance of humanity as a whole, to be shared together. We consider the common also and more significantly those results of social production, such as knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects, and so forth. This notion of the common does not position humanity separate from nature, as either its exploiter or its custodian, but focuses rather on the practices of interaction, care, and cohabitation in a common world, Promoting the beneficial and limiting the detrimental forms of the common. In the era of globalization, issues of the maintenance, Production, and distribution of the common in both senses and in both ecological and socioeconomic frameworks become increas- ingly central, (Hardt and Negri, 2009: viii) Both public institutes and private actors contribute toa. common that can be used as a source for new e work, social interactions and economic trans- actions. Hardt and Negri also say that especially cities are important in creating the conditions for such a common. The philosophers outline a clear genesis of the term ‘le commun’ or ‘the common’: according to ‘them, the term ‘common’ was first used in the process of land consolidation at the start of the capitalist era (16-17% century) when, first in England and later all ‘across Europe, shared fields where cattle grazed and forests for collecting wood were converted into private property. However, there is still only little empirical knowledge about the social functioning of a possible common. The island has hardly been explored yet. Also, the political conditions to arrive at such a communality are still very unclear. Hardt and Negri anyway don't expect any good to come from the state, but favour near direct democracy and self-organization. |tis however very doubtful whether these islands have any chance of survival without some sovereign power taking care of them. Should the ‘common’ be legally enforced and be able to rely on legal guarantees to have any chance of survival at all?

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