Page 5 - Critical Theory of Communication as Critical Sociology of Critique

FUCHS: CRITICAL THEORY OF COMMUNICATION AS CRITICAL SOCIOLOGY OF CRITIQUE IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL CAPITALISM

capitalism. Such notions thereby become expressions of instrumental reason.
I agree with Boltanski & Chiapello (2005) that counter-cultural ideas have become subsumed under capitalist
ideology and that critical theory therefore needs to re-think what terms it uses. It is not at all my intention to fetish-
ise the term creativity or to use it as a political demand. In Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media, I use
the term creativity almost exclusively in chapter 2, which is a heavily theoretical chapter that focuses on the rela-
tionship between culture and work. In contrast, the book’s fourth part (chapters 8 and 9) is much more focused on
the question of how we can struggle for political alternatives. In these chapters, I do not use the term creativity a
single time. So it is a misrepresentation to evoke the impression that I see creativity as a political vision, ideal or
political demand. I rather use it in chapter 2 against two specif c theoretical tendencies: a) the notions of creative
industries and creative labour, and b) anarchistic and autonomist theories of anti-work and zero-work.
I have problems with the terms creative industries and creative labour, because they imply a separation be-
tween creativity/non-creativity. Artistic work is typically seen as creative and all other work as non-creative. Such
a dualism suggests an Arnoldian elitist celebration of artists’ work as a form of morally higher activity. It ties in
with ideologies of the creative class. I have problems with the anti-work philosophy, because it tends to imagine
a free society as a society that is based on idleness and the right to be lazy. I certainly do not deny that we live
in a capitalist society of hyper-activity and immense acceleration, in which many people are so preoccupied with
labour that they do not f nd time to rest, which in turn poses threats to their health and lives. But this circumstance
does not imply that we need a society without productive activity. People in a society of idleness would soon be
bored, and boredom can be a source of depression and aggression.
I use the notion of creativity against both these theoretical and political tendencies in order to stress that, as
such, all humans are creative, active beings. Creativity is not an ideal or a political demand, but rather a funda-
mental human reality. Marx pinpoints this understanding when Capital Volume 1 he says:

A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a hu-
man architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst
architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it
in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by
the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally (Marx, 1867, p. 284).

Human work is creative in a double sense: all work creates a use-value that satisf es human needs. And all work
requires imagination so that humans consciously plan the result of their activities. All work is in this double sense
creative work, and all industries are creative industries. In a participatory democracy, humans do not stop work-
ing, but because of their inherent drive to be active and create something, they will continue to work, albeit under
very different conditions, under which class rule has been abolished.
Chapter 2 is deliberately written partly in a quite provocative manner. Whereas some will f nd the example of
the toilet-cleaning robots (pp. 45-46) funny, others will read it with disgust. Stephensen (2015, pp. 170, note 1)
observes this ambivalence. All good polemics polarise. And chapter 2 certainly intends to do so. When I speak
of “the becoming-art of the economy” (Fuchs, 2015, p. 48) or the “creativity of all” (Fuchs, 2015, p. 50), I do not
make political demands and do not formulate ideals, but stress against anti-work philosophy that all humans have
creative potentials and are creators. Against the ideas of idle anti-work philosophy and elitist creative industry
ideology, I want to foreground that creativity is a fundamental human necessity and desire.
At the same time, such passages also point towards the fact that not all work today is pleasurable and toil has
not yet ceased to exist in the world. Information work is the production of information. Not all information work
is highly demanding and requires skill; there is also monotonous and repetitive information labour, such as the
labour of call centre agents. Highly skilled and educated information workers tend to be among those who f nd

CONJUNCTIONS, VOL. 3, NO. 1, 2016, ISSN 2246-3755 | PAGE 5