The Creative and The Derivative

SPECUL ATIONS
The Creative and the Derivative

Historicizing Creativity under
Post – Bretton Woods Financialization
Max Haiven
On the one hand, the financial sector is incredibly creative. Some of the finest and
most refined minds of each successive generation are cherry-picked by hedge funds,
investment banks, and their institutional periphery to dream up ever more rapid,
cunning, and diabolical ways to make money out of money.1 The development of
new derivative financial products, new avenues of intermarket arbitrage, new rev-
enue streams to capitalize, and new ways of reading, visualizing, and interpreting
the market have seduced not only the graduates of elite business programs but also
PhDs in fluid dynamics, astrophysics, cellular biology, and computer engineering.
To be sure, the vast majority of work in the financial sector is profoundly uncreative
(endless number crunching and paper pushing, meticulous research on economic
sectors and investments, frenetic digital trading and power brokering). Taken as a
whole, however, it is a staggering reactor of human creativity, a playground of the
mind where the unfathomable pressure of intense competition creates a vicious eco-
system of innovation, which, no less strange than the uncanny depths of the ocean,
is populated with monsters at the very limits of the imagination.
Still, for all that intelligence and innovation, the sector mostly produces
immaterial speculative financial assets — in other words, practically nothing of tan-
gible or lasting value. From one angle, in fact, it destroys value: liquidating public
assets by privatizing services, foreclosing on homes and businesses, and imposing
Radical History Review

Issue 118 (Winter 2014) doi 10.1215/01636545-2349142
© 2014 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.
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austerity measures that funnel social wealth upward to an apparently lawless global
oligarchy. Financial forces also superintend a global economic system that is charac-
terized by a massively unfair global division of creative labor, where creative oppor-
tunities are reserved for a fraction of the world’s population (mostly in Northern
cities). The remainder spends longer days and shorter lives in fields, factories, and
kitchens, with little opportunity to practice creativity and even less to have it recog-
nized or valued. Most of the wealth “created” by the financial sector is, in a sense,
derivative — it derives its value by representing and manipulating real-world labor
and wealth. Finance is a glitzy simulacrum of value that nonetheless disciplines and
(dis)orients the economic and social world.2
Financial wizards would counter that their constant lust to find new ways to
maximize moment-to-moment returns generates an atmosphere of competition and
“creative destruction” in the global economy that spurs on human creativity in the
corporate form. Financiers pride themselves on being what we might call “angels
of creative destruction” who drive a market of accelerating returns that renders
obsolete those stagnant or sluggish firms and economic entities that can’t keep pace.
Unlike Walter Benjamin’s aghast angel of history, these spirits show no regret for
the destruction left in their wake and face narcissistically forward, toward the short-
term future, where they find only their own reflection as financial markets further
discipline our broader social and economic worlds.3
This essay investigates and historicizes what I’ll call contemporary finance
capitalism’s “dialectic of creativity” from two angles. Initially, it unravels into the
above contradiction between finance’s particular institutional creativity and its sys-
temic anticreativity. Then it pulls together some threads of an intertwined history in
which both finance and the idea of “creativity” rose to global prominence over the
past forty years. In fact, these two aspects provide financialization’s warp and weft,
and considering them as knit together helps to reframe and to historicize both the
cultural life of finance and the economic life of creativity.
The Everyday Creativity of Post – Bretton Woods Financialization

Finance is difficult to define because its borders have never been sharp. Today most
commentators identify finance as the so-called “FIRE” sector: high finance (invest-
ment banks, hedge funds, stock markets, corporate financing); insurance (relatively
commonplace accident, health, and fire insurance, and more complex financial and
corporate insurance); and real estate.4 While the financial sector has been domi-
nated by specific institutions, practices, and actors (stock markets, investors, futures
trading), its pervasive influence also implicates other disparate sectors of the state
and economy whose reliance on, intervention in, and support for the core finan-
cial sector leave the latter’s perimeter blurry, to say the least.5 Financialization has
become even more complex in the past forty years, a period defined by the devel-
opment of new communication technologies permitting faster financial transfers

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Haiven | The Creative and the Derivative 115
around the globe and by the development of an array of ultrasophisticated financial

techniques. This shift has generally seen the transition of finance toward an ever
more quantitative matrix of advanced formulas oriented around the scientistic man-
agement of risk.6 For cultural theorist Randy Martin, this shift has been marked by
finance’s imperative to comprehensively map the future through mindbending tech-
niques for measuring and manipulating probability. The derivative is the archetypi-
cal “technology” of this paradigm, one that allows for the commodification of future
uncertainty as present-day “risk” and so thrusts capital’s reach toward eternity.7
“Financialization” denotes the growing influence of financial markets on the
capitalist economy — such that, in 2005, the financial sector claimed over 40 percent
of all profits in the world’s largest economy, the United States. As John Bellamy Fos-
ter and Fred Magdoff put it: “Every twenty-four days the dollar volume of currency
trading [and that excludes a whole variety of other financial exchanges] equals the
entire world’s annual GDP [gross domestic product].”8 Ostensibly acting on behalf
of their clients, financiers led a revolution in the 1980s and 1990s, demanding that
companies adopt the primary goal of “maximizing shareholder value” — meaning not
simply higher profit-derived dividends for investors but also year-over-year (indeed,
quarter-over-quarter) improvements in share prices themselves.9 This new regime
has produced corporate leaders (many of whom cut their teeth in the financial sec-
tor) who are utterly unapologetic for their actions (and this extends to private firms
and even to the public sector), the last vestiges of corporate paternalism or nation-
alism evaporating under the heat of a constant imperative to “perform” market
adaptability — participating, that is, in the proverbial race to the bottom that seeks
to minimize costs and maximize profits and market share, with little regard for
long-term strategy, much less for anachronisms like workers’ rights and the environ-
mental responsibility.
Financialization is also a matter of politics and the public sector. Though
modern governments have long carried massive debts (which are never really
repaid), global markets exert today a tremendous influence over social and eco-
nomic policy.10 For example, because global financial flows have rendered capital
so mobile, states must compete for investment by pursuing neoliberal policies that,
ironically enough, make finance more mobile still (free trade agreements, deregula-
tion, bailouts, drastic cuts to public spending).11 Most governments also now depend
on the sale of bonds to finance their deficits (a result of neoliberal policies that
starve the state of corporate and individual tax revenues) and so must prove them-
selves to be attractive investment habitats (high bond ratings being necessary to
avoid excessive interest rates and thus more difficult access to loans).12 Meanwhile,
desperate to create “jobs” and attract “investment,” the state faces new demands to
help finance works of semiprivatized civil infrastructure (roads, canals, ports) and
an array of semiprivate industries (aerospace, biotechnology, the military-industrial
complex, tourism, etc.), providing backing and guarantees to indemnify financial

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investors against risk.13 The revenue-starved state treats the welfare of its citizens
less in terms of any democratic responsibility and more through the financial logic
of risk management, a kind of economic triage.14 Health, education, and civil infra-
structure projects come to be assessed for their returns on investment and their
potential to be “leveraged” toward economic growth or future government savings.
All this takes place while the privatization of state services and common wealth
continue apace — housing, education, social security, and pensions all rendered unto
the market in the name of personal freedom and economic growth. As Michael
Hudson astutely notes, the financial sector has effectively become an unaccount-
able and pathologically self-obsessed form of economic planning, with disastrous
consequences.15
These last examples open onto the second dimension of financialization,
which complements the economic and political shift with a sociological and cultural
one. Louis Hyman, for one, has chronicled the intertwined cultural, social, political,
and economic transformations that saw a quantitative and qualitative shift in the
nature of debt in America since the First World War.16 Whereas debt before this
time was seen as a moral and social ill and the mark of bad character, by the 1970s,
with the rise of new forms of student debt, mortgages, credit cards, and car loans,
debt became a normal and expected part of mature economic subjectivity. The
astute management of debt and the cultivation of financial acumen have become,
in the neoliberal period, key cultural tropes, broadly in keeping with the massive
reliance on debt and credit by both individuals and firms in advanced economies.17
The ratio of household debt to GDP in the United States increased from 48 percent
in 1981 to 100 percent in 2007, and over the same period average household debt-
to-income ratios increased from 65 percent to 135 percent.18 Anthropologist David
Graeber notes that while debt has been a key component of most (if not all) human
civilizations, it enters a new phase in the neoliberal moment when its ability to dis-
cipline economic actors and to conflate moral with financial obligations becomes
more common and more intensive than ever, and also more deeply entwined with
the economic system as a whole.19
Debt’s normalcy and its ubiquity reveal a facet of the cultural dimensions of
financialization — a process made commonplace as the ideas and tropes of financial
management have seeped into our everyday parlance.20 All news is business news
these days, from hurricanes to sports scores, from political campaigns to epidemics,
and members of the viewing public are addressed as savvy investors.21 Education
has become an individualized “investment in the future.”22 Self-help books advise
that most aspects of life, from personal destiny to romantic relationships to par-
enting, can and should be understood as processes of “investment” for “returns.”23
Housing and community have become investments in “equity,” as concerns about
property prices drive a paranoid and vindictive urban politics.24 Volunteering and
work are to be seen as investments in the self, the building of an appealing portfolio

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of skills, experience, and competencies to be hawked to employers. Arts and culture,

even religion, are seen as investments in one’s soul, and exercise is viewed as an
investment in one’s body.25
Financialization is part and parcel of what sociologists like Ulrich Beck and
Jacob S. Hacker see as a fundamental neoliberal transformation of social risk away
from collective forms of insurance (provided, under Keynesianism, by the state)
and toward the individual as an isolated “risk manager.”26 Here there is an implicit
reliance on personal creativity, as economic (and social and physical) survival is
downloaded onto the individual and as the individual is expected to leverage his or
her social location, skills, and creative energies into opportunities for success and
fulfillment. For free-market thinkers, a vague notion of creativity is at the heart of
“human capital,” and restrictions on markets are antithetical to the abstract ideal of
“freedom” and, relatedly, to the innate human capacity for creativity.27 Free mar-
kets and the policies that support them encourage individuals to satisfy their cre-
ative potential through market competition or through the consumption of products
or services.
Of course, the idea that the exposure of more areas of life to market forces
makes us all more creative is not altogether without merit. Yet for the vast majority
of us, this creativity comes in the form of the everyday work of financial survival, of
balancing multiple and precarious part-time jobs, elevated levels of debt, and obliga-
tions to friends, children, and relatives whose care has been privatized or degraded.
As Silvia Federici notes, the financialized economy is highly gendered, with women
taking up the majority of the “reproductive labor” left in the wake of the retreat of
the welfare state and staffing the bulk of the low-paid service sector.28 Neoliberal-
ism and financialization, then, are defined in part by the reliance of capitalism (and
capitalist society) on a highly delimited form of individual creativity, where social
reproduction has become the work of risk management in uncertain times. The
vast majority of this “creative labor” goes unremunerated and unsung. Indeed, most
is not imagined to be “creative” at all. There is nothing considered more banal or
derivative than the everyday work of paying the rent, or buying school supplies, or
navigating the debt-driven economy, yet these are quickly becoming sites of tremen-
dous creativity, though a creativity under great strain, leaving little time or energy
for those forms of experimentation and expression we typically prefer to associate
with that term.
While everyday life is always uncertain, the normalization of economic inse-
curity as “risk” disguises the fact that this precarity ultimately serves to reproduce
the current financialized paradigm. This was vividly dramatized in the subprime
mortgage meltdown: poor home owners were plied with high-r isk loans that most
pushers knew to be ticking time bombs. These loans were collateralized and repack-
aged as low-r isk investments and sold on to banks and financial institutions that
proceeded to sell them again to unwitting clients, again marketed (with the blessing

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of ratings agencies) as nearly risk-free holdings. Such is the fundamental tenor of

the system: an extremely competitive financial culture that effectively “externalizes”
its risk onto trusting home owners, on the one hand, and trusting investors (like
pension funds), on the other. And, of course, after the events of 2008 the costs of
these risks taken by the financial sector were externalized, too — onto the public, as
governments were coerced into bailouts worth trillions of dollars. Nefarious indeed;
also cunningly creative.
Creative Capitalism and Venture Philanthropy

In 2008, mere weeks before the global financial sector publicly disemboweled itself,
Bill Gates unveiled a new concept at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos,
Switzerland. Standing before a pantheon of world economic, financial, and political
elites, the founder and departing CEO of Microsoft offered up the idea of “creative
capitalism.”29 The depths of depravity behind the subprime fiasco not yet apparent,
the attendees at that year’s WEF were in a particularly self-congratulatory mood,
having just honored Muhammad Yunus, microcredit pioneer of the Grameen Bank,
who had engineered a market-friendly means of profiting from the world’s poorest,
while instilling in them the creative spirit of competition and financial responsibil-
ity.30 Riding this crest of good feeling, Gates, then the world’s richest man, offered a
spirited, if somewhat nebulous, articulation of his vision of capitalism with a human
face. Citing his own efforts at the helm of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
he proposed to turn that accumulated expertise, as well as targeted “investments”
by corporations and individuals, toward solving some of humanity’s most pressing
problems (such as AIDS, malaria, malnutrition). Gates praised the support already
offered by Warren Buffett — superstar hedge-fund manager and fellow world’s rich-
est men’s club member — who turned over a huge portion of his huger fortune to the
Gates Foundation.31
The robber barons of old tended to donate their money to majestic civic
structures, the iconic collection of great works of culture, and institutions of higher
education. These acts of “charity” were a dimension of a class struggle that mobilized
“culture” as a terrain of both distinction and discipline. But the Gates Foundation
and its ilk differ in substantial ways from previous generations of financier philan-
thropy, and the idea of creative capitalism is more than a salve for the multibillion-
aire’s conscience. “Giving” (which today names a whole industry of petty financiers
who specialize in managing philanthropy) is now a form of leveraged investment for
today’s financial donors. The Gates Foundation works to import a financialized ethos
into the world of charities, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and government
activities themselves, an ethos oriented toward the maximization of “donor value.”32
Take, for instance, the Gates Foundation’s contributions toward initiatives
in the wayward US public education system.33 Bill Gates himself has named this as
one of his priorities and has often addressed conferences of education leaders, advo-

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cating reforms geared toward producing graduates who will better meet the needs
of business in the hypercompetitive twenty-first century. Perhaps predictably, and
resorting to a cache of feel-good slogans (including, notably, “creativity”), the Gates
Foundation has funded numerous education consultancies and think tanks that
champion the privatization and standardization exemplified by the Bush adminis-
tration’s No Child Left Behind policy, trends now squarely within the mainstream of
US (and increasingly global) education policy. These trends include the mandatory
implementation of standardized testing, the reduction of school programming to the
core curriculum, the privatization of many “auxiliary” educational “services” (caf-
eterias, libraries, janitorial services, infrastructure, transportation, clerical work),
and the opening up of public education to individual “choice,” especially in the form
of vouchers and “charter schools,” which allow parents to choose where to “invest”
their public education dollars among multiple competing private or semiprivate
institutions.34 For the Gates Foundation, these initiatives represent a more “creative
“ form of giving — inheriting, publicizing, and exacerbating a neoliberal distrust of
state-run public institutions in the belief (despite so much evidence to the contrary)
that markets are the most efficient, effective, and just means to deliver social goods
to citizens.
The Gates Foundation forms a key part of a broader shift in philanthropy
toward a financialized model. Charities, NGOs, and “social capital” or “social inno-
vation” firms are now expected to manage themselves as corporations by develop-
ing rigorous metrics for measuring “impact” and “success” and by trimming budget
lines, relying on temporary or intern labor that makes work ever more precarious.35
Sometimes going by the name of “venture philanthropy,” or philanthrocapitalism,
this approach often focuses on short-term, measurable results, much like in the cor-
porate world where ever-increasing quarterly profits help inflate stock prices while
potentially (usually) damaging or completely curtailing long-term strategy. More-
over, many of the charities, NGOs, and initiatives funded by such venture philan-
thropy foundations aim to “leverage” change out of relatively small investments. In
keeping with a broader neoliberal hostility toward relationships of long-term depen-
dency, preference goes to schemes that supply small injections of (heavily audited)
funding to help individuals, groups, or neighborhoods “enter the market” and suc-
ceed (or fail) on their own accord. 36 Community-based initiatives (in the Third
World or in the First) are geared toward (micro)financing new business ventures or
developing the infrastructure to foster “self-sufficient” institutions. As we have seen,
educational initiatives aim at educational entrepreneurialism, which transfers risk
and opportunity onto creative individuals.
Gates never defined or even repeated the term creativity outside the title
of his speech in Davos. In one sense, the hollowness of the term allows it to trans-
mit and reinforce the implicit neoliberal orthodoxy that state-led efforts to alle-
viate human suffering and poverty have conclusively “failed” and that “creative”

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market-driven solutions are needed (rather than, say, a fundamental redistribution

of wealth). But it was precisely the emptiness of the term creative that drew the
umbrage of several neoliberal critics who charged Gates with implying that the sys-
tem wasn’t already creative enough.37 For them, the free market is a natural and
historically unique force for creativity, and any motives beyond the constant quest
for profit were antithetical to this force, imposing the subjective will and prefer-
ences of soft-hearted corporate executives over the inherently superior (if ruthless)
intelligence of the market. Gates and his allies responded that these motives were
not antithetical to free markets and that corporate philanthropy was also profitable,
when imagined as enlightened self-interest. Curing key Third World diseases or
social problems, improving education, and alleviating poverty, on the whole, opened
up new markets, built trust in corporations, and eliminated systemic risks in the
global economy. “Creativity” was required to see beyond the competitive silo build-
ing and short-term profiteering that saw “doing good” as insignificant to “doing
well,” saw governments as inherent barriers to free markets, and saw capitalism as
inherently beneficial in all cases. But why creativity? Why is it that Gates and his
army of handlers, advisors, and ghostwriters selected this term in order to “rebrand”
capitalism in an age of hyperfinancialization? What has made it so appealing and so
universal? If Gates’s vision is for a “creative” capitalism, what does that imply about
other and previous forms of capitalism and social organization?
Angels of Creative Destruction

For financiers, and those who defend the sector, the financial industries are inher-
ently creative because they support and drive the creativity of the capitalist econ-
omy. Finance, they claim, supplies capital to firms to pursue competitive ventures,
innovative products, improved forms of manufacture, and new ideas. Defenders of
the financial system argue that so advanced is the financial sector’s management of
market risk that it provides unprecedented opportunities. The logic of the market
is such that investors will stake gambles on multiple prospects, advancing resources
to a plurality of creative economic ventures, though only a handful will survive. Not
only does finance then facilitate a huge number of creative pursuits, it also ensures
(by placing economic pressure on these investees) that the best creative ideas and
projects survive, and those that are (comparatively) inefficient or unmarketable fail
or are forced to merge or restructure.38
This romantic narrative of what finance accomplishes emerges as perhaps
the single most powerful rationale for the financial sector both within and beyond
its quarters. Wall Street anthropologist Karen Ho reports that when investment
bankers are not simply justifying their actions as the natural expression of biologi-
cal human competitive individualism, they measure the social good of their work
in its capacity to foster creativity, innovation, and dynamism within the economy
at large.39 Even when financiers are engaged in what would appear to be entirely

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destructive and predatory pursuits (like private equity firms that strip bankrupt
companies of assets and worker protections then “flip” them on the market, currency
speculators who play havoc with national economies, or subprime securities traders
who benefit from endemic poverty), they make recourse to a narrative that justifies
financial accumulation in the name of economic creativity.
“Creative destruction” has become, in fact, an important phrase for the
financial sector and the advocates of its further deregulation. The idea emerges in
its fullest form from Joseph Schumpeter’s reading of Marx, the latter having drawn
on Adam Smith to observe the ways capitalism is constantly revolutionizing itself,
leading to massive waste when old machinery (and whole populations) is idled and
reduced to worthlessness as capitalists compete to lower the costs of production.40
Importantly, for Marx, this “creative destruction” was the root and effect of the
endemic crisis of the falling rate of profit (capitalists so strive to lower production
costs that they drive themselves out of business and drive workers into potentially
revolutionary poverty) and the financial system.41 The latter exists, at least in part,
to facilitate the ever-increasing capital costs of new manufacturing technologies, and
to the extent that the rate of technological innovation accelerates, industrial capital-
ists are increasingly indebted to and reliant on financial capitalists, from whom they
must borrow the huge capital investment necessary to remain competitive.42 For
Marx, in the Communist Manifesto and elsewhere, the creative/destructive spirit
of capitalism was both its greatest gift and its greatest liability. Marx celebrated
capitalism’s ability to sweep away the historic baggage of feudalism and to radi-
cally transform human material relations, believing that this creative destruction
was the necessary precondition of communism. Driven by individual competitive
agents, industrial capitalism’s tremendous creative force viciously tore apart the
social world, but that creative force was, in fact, the alienated and abstracted power
of “living labor,” organized by and for capitalism’s irrational drives. Only after a
communist revolution could workers reclaim their creative power and organize it
rationally and in their own interests.
Marx’s dialectic of creative destruction would not only resonate in the strug-
gles of workers and in anticolonial movements but would also influence and inspire
numerous modernist and avant-garde movements in the arts. For protofascist futur-
ists and anarcho-syndicalist surrealists, the role of the artist was to presage and
prefigure the revolutionary subject, to be an angel of creative destruction, ruth-
lessly dismissing the accumulated aesthetic and intellectual baggage of a bygone
age and pioneering into new realms of thought, perception, and action. This notion
of progressive, militant creativity, which inherits (via Marx) a Hegelian teleology of
progress and history, remains with us, even in our thoroughly postmodern times.43
However, now it is central to the ideological trappings of our new “unacknowledged
legislators,” those poets of the dark arts of finance.44
The discourse of creative destruction today is of course very different from

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Marx’s analysis, very different even from Schumpeter’s wry observations, which
were intended not as an unqualified celebration of capitalism’s “creative” powers but
rather as a warning about their potential to dramatically disrupt the social fabric.45
With accelerating frequency through the late 1990s, the term creative destruction
began to appear in the business press and in management books to refer to the
beneficial impacts of globalization. For instance, both the Economist and the New
York Times featured the term only a handful of times up until 1996. Thereafter
its appearance accelerated exponentially, first in reference to Schumpeter’s concept
but then, by 2002, as its own self-referential truism. By 2001 best-selling books
with prophetic titles like Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to
Last Underperform the Market — and How to Successfully Transform Them and
Creative Destruction: Business Survival Strategies in the Global Internet Economy
celebrated the zeitgeist of interconnected markets.46 Claustrophobic cultural norms
and retrograde consumer markets were to be swept away by the free movement of
capital around the world, as were inefficient and unfair labor practices and corrupt
governments. This rhetoric reached a fevered pitch during the dot-com boom at
the turn of the millennium, when our old friend Bill Gates was among those CEOs
leading the choir in praise of a borderless digital economy that would sweep away
tired old corporations and open up bold new markets, as well as allow the creative
entrepreneur in each individual to shine through.47 Indeed, so much opportunity
was said to abound that individuals who failed to seize it had only themselves to
blame, an impression that lent itself to the drive to privatize and to cut social ser-
vices. Even meager forms of economic redistribution, it was feared, would encour-
age dependency in individuals and render them unwilling to creatively embrace the
risks and rewards of the new economy. The appearance of “creativity” as the partner
of “destruction” here was no accident, or, more accurately, it was no accident that
Schumpeter’s initially pessimistic and academic term became a crucial element of
financial self-representation. In much the same way that discourses of innovation,
progress, science, and ingenuity were applied to the technological development of
nuclear bombs, the slippery language of creativity offers an unaccountable rhetoric
that both excuses and facilitates financial speculation’s destructive practices in the
interests of the ruling paradigm.
The Discipline of Creativity

Creativity’s ability to elicit universal good feeling is relatively recent. In the Middle
Ages, the term hardly existed in the English lexicon. Words stemming from its Latin
root — creatus — t ypically were employed to refer to God the creator or to his “cre-
ations.”48 It was not until the “birth of the author” in the eighteenth century that the
term was widely applied to a particular human quality or skill. As the bourgeoisie
rose to prominence in Europe and demanded cultural artifacts through which they
could reckon and display their “distinction” from the protoproletariat, the work of

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art gained its stamp of authenticity and transcendental value from the figure of what
would, in the nineteenth century, come to be known as the “creative genius,” the
unique and refined imagination of the singular individual.49 The mythological figure
of the artist was to be held up as the mirror image of the economic entrepreneur:
both individuals imposed their masculine will on the world and begat productive
order out of meaningless or wasteful nature.50
Creativity remained largely associated with the work of artists and authors,
as the European “high arts” gained their creative esteem primarily by contrasting
themselves with more pedestrian forms of culture. Whether working in factories,
on plantations, or in various administrative positions, the vast majority of humanity
who were enrolled in European-led capitalism were systematically denied any real
opportunity for creative expression, and what little was afforded them was belittled
and mocked by elites as uncreative: peasant dances, indigenous musics, and work-
ers’ popular culture were all seen as hopelessly derivative. 51 In this regard, little
has changed, yet by the postwar period “creativity” became associated with people
outside the professional arts.52 Promising material stability and affluence in return
for productivity, a clear division of labor defined the Keynesian moment of capital-
ism and the New Deal, which left very little opportunity for creative expression
for most people. But if the first generation of postwar youth and many workers of
the late 1960s revolted against oppressive and exploitative working conditions, they
also revolted against a cultural idiom.53 Not just about “good jobs” or the nature of
state power, these movements demanded the liberation of creativity and the right to
define life, subjectivity, culture, and human potential. The influence of authors like
Herbert Marcuse and the situationists stemmed, in part, from their insistence that
capitalism systematically dulled and constrained human individuality and creative
expression.54
As Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello point out, over the 1970s and 1980s
these ideals ironically became the watchwords for the reorganization of capitalism
itself, as it incorporated both its “social” and “artistic” critique in order to shrug
off the imposition of Keynesian regulations.55 Under the banner of liberating indi-
viduals from the shackles of “big government” and paternalistic corporations, a new
paradigm of neoliberal privatization was implemented. Not only a consumer choice
(through hobbies, tastes, predilections), creativity became an economic impera-
tive. From industrial shop floors to the foosball-tabled Creative Labs of Google, all
workers today are supposed to contribute their creative ideas to make their firms
more competitive while also embracing their creative passions and abilities — both
in response to the churning insouciance of the market.56 In this period, as Angela
McRobbie notes, artists are held up as the “pioneers of the new economy,” their
contract-based employment and their seamless integration of work life with social
life with home life with a passionate dream life having been positioned as a beacon
to those “uncreative” souls struggling to make ends meet through the drudgery of

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multiple part-t ime, temporary jobs.57 To this we can also add the rise of the “pro-
sumer,” the enlightened, participatory consuming subject who is conscripted to lend
his or her ideas, energies, and creative passions to his or her engagement with highly
tailored commodities.58
At one level, creativity’s move from the margin to the center of capitalist
ideology is linked to the financialization of the system. Financialization is driven,
ultimately, by a speculative ethos with a voracious appetite for the performance of
newness. To demonstrate their quality to investors, firms need to prove not merely
profitability but also the spirit of innovation, a capacity to stay ahead of the curve,
to constantly revolutionize their means of production (and distribution and sales).
Financialization, then, drives and is driven by an economy pathologically addicted
to the performance of creativity.
Creativity’s particular wooliness as a concept here guarantees its utility. In
an age where everything is quantified and measured, creativity’s qualitative and
immeasurable character makes it a perfect disciplinary discourse. One can, of
course, never be creative enough or could always be more creative. Ironically, but
importantly, the financialized order of things, which so depends on the transfor-
mation of social life into mathematically digestible data, also relies on notions like
creativity that, while they exist outside its formal episteme, render it functional and
help define its borders.
Disciplinarity may, in fact, be the wrong term. Maurizio Lazzarato, seek-
ing to understand the role of finance in the creation of contemporary capitalism
and capitalist subjectivity, draws on Gilles Deleuze’s reinterpretation of the work of
the later Michel Foucault, tracing the shift away from a “society of discipline” and
toward a “society of control.”59 For Lazzarato, debt and the financialization of social
life are less about the seizure and repression of freedoms than about the creation
of financialized subjects, to whom they offer a highly refined, highly delimited form
of freedom.60 This approach draws on Lazzarato’s earlier work on the creative and
immaterial laborer: our moment of so-called cognitive capitalism does not simply
exploit the worker in new ways, it creates an environment in which certain subjec-
tivities are possible, profitable, and exalted.61 Today, Lazzarato argues, we are all
encouraged to imagine we are “entrepreneurs of the self,” embracing the flux and
chaos of these precarious and financialized times as the opportunity for the maxi-
mization of individuality, creative possibility, and freedom.62
The language of “creativity” is fundamental to this shift. For example, Greig
de Peuter and Nick Dyer-Witheford illustrate this shift through an investigation of
the video game industry.63 Their fascinating book details two key facets of this prob-
lem. First, they show how the entire industry relies upon new modes of labor exploi-
tation to harness the creative energies of not only formal employees and legions
of independent subcontractors and freelancers but also fans and consumers who
(usually for free or for subcultural prestige) contribute their immaterial labor to

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modifying, expanding, bug checking, beta testing, and otherwise refining propri-
etary digital products. This, Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter argue, is demonstra-
tive of much broader trends under “cognitive capitalism,” where “work” escapes the
formal bounds of employment and where creativity is tapped from multiple sources
to accelerate an ever-expanding commodity market. A more profound realization
emerges from this work as well: that for all this phenomenal creativity and collabora-
tion, the video game industry and its products continue to conform to a very narrow
spectrum of aesthetic, narrative, and visual tropes and patterns. That is, in spite
of being emblematic of an emergent industry fundamentally organized around the
harness and capture of creativity, the industry is oddly uncreative. Most games are
highly derivative, largely replications of other, more established genres and conven-
tions, with small but marketable differences.
Portfolio Theory
To better understand the demand that we see ourselves less as employees and more
as entrepreneurs, less as citizens and more as consumers of government services,
less as common souls and more as investors of the self, we might borrow here a term
from finance itself to make sense of the place of creativity within the financialized
moment: portfolio theory. Developed by Harry Markowitz in the 1950s, portfolio
theory was part of the seismic transformation of finance from a largely qualitative to
a primarily quantitative field, one that was to be driven to new heights in the 1970s
and 1980s with the development of digitized trading mechanisms and more complex
mathematical formulas for risk management and the manipulation of probabilities
(like the Black-Scholes formula for calculating the price of derivatives).64
Portfolio theory is based on the relatively simple idea that one should mea-
sure the risk of a whole portfolio of equities, rather than each individual equity,
when making financial calculations. It implies that the various levels of risk exposure
across a range of assets can help balance each other out, and thus one should diver-
sify holdings to buttress high-r isk/high-y ield investments in one dimension of one’s
portfolio with low-r isk/low-y ield investments in another. Expressed in the quanti-
tative formulas of finance, this concept changed finance’s dynamic (one was now
to imagine investing as an array of detached and counterbalanced abstract assets,
rather than as holdings in particular firms or concerns) and opened the door for the
processes of “securitization” that have generally guided investments from equity in
single stocks, bonds, or holdings toward other portfolios (mutual funds, for example,
which offer a share in a balanced assortment of investments) or in derivative prod-
ucts that allow investors to buy highly customized exposure to risk to help round out
a highly complex portfolio.65
Portfolio theory moves us out of a linear logic of finance, which implies the
steady accumulation of profit from long-term investment in certain concerns, toward
a more chaotic and scattered pattern, which sees profit generated by overlapping,

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interreferential, and even contradictory short-term investments as part of an overall

portfolio. More generally, it speaks to the identification of financial actors not with
what they own (as in this many shares in Ford Motor Company, this many bonds
from the government of France) but with a more dynamic financialized subjectivity,
as they move through markets with fluidity, juggle commitments that are multiple
and contingent, ephemeral and disposable, and partake in a culture of creative arbi-
trage.66 The portfolio bears the mark of the investor-self and comes to define the
subjectivity of that investor. The celebrity that has accrued to Buffett is in many
ways a celebration of his cagy, canny, unflinching, and intuitive integration of his
subjectivity with the market. His portfolio is celebrated as a sort of enviable inti-
macy with market patterns.67
As with the financier, so with us “entrepreneurs of the self.” We are encour-
aged to imagine our subjectivities as defined by “portfolios” of traits, skills, experi-
ences, and competencies that we might rent out and to see this as the expression
of inherent creativity. Here the model portfolio is that not only of the financier but
also of the artist. Within the art world, the portfolio is likewise the dossier of the
subject, not only a collection of the artist’s works (to be sent to prospective galleries,
art schools, and juried competitions) but also a sort of confessional of the whole life
of the creative subject.68 The portfolio offers both an understanding of the “invest-
ments” the artist has made in his or her skills, education, experience, and connec-
tions, as well as a window into the soul itself, implying access to the time and labor
of its submitter and to the raw core of “human capital” itself: the ineffable substance
of creativity. (An example closer to home might also be found in the academic cur-
riculum vitae.)
The idea of creativity is, then, more than merely romantic rhetoric; it speaks,
imprecisely, to the fundamental stakes of class struggle. For Marx, living labor is
that substance that capital, through the wage relationship, transforms into abstract
labor power, which it puts to work producing commodities, which then it sells so
that the surplus value might be reinvested in the process of exploitation.69 The value
of “living” labor resides in its human character (setting it apart from the dead labor
of accumulated commodities). It is animated by reflexivity, dynamism, cooperation,
and the capacity for innovation. The idea of creativity is a partial, highly individu-
alized (and bourgeois) glimpse of the sublime tectonics of living labor, which lies
encrypted within every commodity and which animates every social relationship.
The idea of creativity speaks to that ingredient in living labor that gives it vitality
and value: its very precariousness, its capacity to risk. Living labor represents the
element of the unexpected in the dynamic of capitalist exploitation. It is not just the
energy of human bodies; it is that quality of mind causing those bodies to experi-
ment, to try new things, to take risks.
The portfolio attempts to measure and to discipline living labor: In isolating

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and pitching their creative accomplishments, workers are made to render visible
precisely those aspects of themselves that are irreplaceable, as well as to isolate only
those risks they’ve taken that have been recognized and rewarded. The portfolio
is, after all, a collection of things others have found valuable. If, to some degree,
all creativity is about taking risks, then the portfolio externalizes that risk onto the
individual even as it submits risk’s benefits to investment. The portfolio speaks to the
viability of the applicant or worker as a vehicle for speculation.
Creative Cities
For Autonomist theorists including Lazzarato and Antonio Negri, our current
moment is defined in large part by a fundamental shift in the nature of capitalist
exploitation. In a previous moment (during European industrialization), capitalism
was defined at the abstract level by a “formal subsumption” of labor to capital — that
is, the extraction of surplus value through the harnessing of socially necessary labor
time (as Marx called it) or, put somewhat differently, the abstract labor of workers
multiplied by the duration of their labor. With the advent of post-Fordist production,
globalization, and new forms of consumerism and service-sector work, however,
these authors argue that we have entered a phase of “real subsumption” in which
work occurs throughout the “social factory” such that capitalist measure and disci-
pline are applied across the social fabric and, moreover, social life itself becomes
an object of capitalist speculation and commodification.70 “Cognitive capitalism”
is characterized by the expansion and proliferation of capital’s “technologies” and
techniques (dispositifs) for capturing living labor beyond the factory. As Christian
Marazzi illustrates, the financial sector itself is foundational to the development,
sustainability, and measurement of these new dispositifs.71 Drawing on the example
of the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s, he argues that finance offers liquid capital
to a whole variety of attempts to marketize and commodify the creative and commu-
nicative energies of workers and consumers. While perhaps only 1 percent of firms
succeed (paying for the other 99 percent that end in failure), finance effectively wid-
ens and pluralizes capitalism’s social factory. For other autonomist thinkers, includ-
ing Federici and Massimo De Angelis, this represents less a new paradigm and more
the continuation and intensification of capitalism’s historic trajectory to “enclose”
the “commons.” They borrow the concept from Marx’s writings on the origins of
capitalism in the “primitive accumulation” of common lands, and then they extend
it to illuminate the ways that common spaces of autonomy, solidarity, and social
experimentation are successively incorporated into and subsumed within capital-
ism’s overarching paradigm.72
We can use this framework to understand the recent rise of discourses about
the “creative city” and the financialized dimensions of urban struggles over creativ-
ity and space. Since the publication in 2002 of Richard Florida’s runaway success

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The Rise of the Creative Class, the enthusiasm for creativity has reached precipi-
tous new heights. Florida argues that, in the postindustrial global landscape, cities
that attract and retain creative individuals enjoy significant economic and social
benefits.73 If urban policy and funding were directed toward projects that made
neighborhoods appeal to an ever more mobile and cosmopolitan “creative class” of
knowledge workers, then economic prosperity and corporate investment would fol-
low them, at the same time as improving the social climate of the city, promoting
citizen engagement and social cohesion.
Florida has noted on several occasions that efforts to improve creativity must
dovetail with efforts to reduce inequality and regulate corporate powers.74 Yet Flor-
ida’s ideas have generally been taken up in a neoliberal register, helping to recon-
figure capitalist labor discipline in ways meant to capture and exploit (indeed, to
shape and mold) the creative energies and passions of workers in a digitized age.75 In
the United Kingdom, for instance, the enthusiasm for creativity merged with New
Labor’s efforts to advance a kinder, gentler postindustrial neoliberalism through
the promotion of the cultural industries.76 Rather than seek to reverse the decline
of the manufacturing sector and undo cuts to and privatization of government ser-
vices, the Blair government envisioned the nation’s prosperity as rooted in the pro-
duction of “intangibles.” While, on the whole, cultural institutions enjoyed little
new funding, new monies were made available for limited individual projects that
promised economic and social spin-offs. So, rather than fully fund public education
and supplementary programs for youth (school lunch programs, recreation, special
needs, remedial education), these new initiatives would bring artists into schools
and community centers to offer at-r isk youth a chance to “express themselves.” In
many cases, funding for such projects was dependent on finding “third party” and
“stakeholder” support, which often meant corporate sponsorship. Here, the state
sought to leverage “culture” into a means to evoke and stimulate the inherent market
creativity of citizens as a means toward greater neoliberal transformation, a process
that has only intensified since the dawn of the Age of Austerity and the election of
David Cameron’s Conservative government.
As numerous authors have noted since the 1980s, this championing of art-
ists and creative types also deploys them as the “shock troops of gentrification.”77
Attracted to neighborhoods that offer low rent, little surveillance, and large spaces
for studios, visual artists, designers, actors, dancers, and others have often unwit-
tingly participated in colonizing poor, often racialized zones. As “creatives” move in,
and new services and business follow, they make these neighborhoods more appeal-
ing to affluent individuals and property speculators, thereby attracting the attention
of the police and other authorities who were, hitherto, largely satisfied to ignore
these areas. And with some 70 percent of financial wealth tied up in real estate, the
inflation of housing costs in major cities has fueled financial growth over the past
forty years, in tandem with mortgage financing and real estate sales and develop-

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ment.78 In other words, neoliberal urban redevelopment is eminently financialized;

it is both driven by and benefits the financial sector.79
According to David Harvey, the city is a zone in which capitalism negoti-
ates the problem of cultural autonomy.80 Capital is driven, in part, by competition
for monopoly rents and the ability to profit by delimited access to scarce or unique
“resources.” While this is perhaps clearest in the case of mines, railways, land, natu-
ral resources, and large-scale or irreproducible infrastructure, Harvey’s concern is
for the ineffable substance of “local” culture and the way a whole variety of indus-
tries, notably tourism and real estate, attempt to capitalize on the unique character
of global spaces and cities. For Harvey, capital’s engagement with these zones is
complex. On the one hand, there is a recognition that this uniqueness, however
saleable and valuable it may be, is the product of a certain degree of cultural and
economic autonomy and is the outgrowth of largely nonmarket relationships and
forms of cooperation. At the same time, capital necessarily seeks to capture and to
exploit that uniqueness, typically replacing it with corporate monocultures, as part
of its drive toward globalization. As local property speculators, regional chains, and
global firms discover unique cultural zones and flock to them, they either bring with
them the homogenizing effects of global capital or they drive up local rents and
prices, pushing out their original creative residents.
I want to reframe this process as bound up with the speculative ethos of
financialization. If, like Lazzarato and many of the other contributors in the recent
collection Critique of Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity, and Resistance in the
“Creative Industries,” we understand the hype around the idea of creativity to be
symptomatic of a shift in capitalist relations toward new dispositifs meant to capture
affective and immaterial labor, then we can read the spatial politics of creative cities
as elemental to this process.81 The patterns illustrated above speak to the way that
speculative capital (in the form of financialized real estate) captures and disciplines
the cultural labors of urban populations, shaping and harnessing their creativity
toward particularly profitable ends. In the same way financialized stocks and shares
discipline and profit from companies, in the same way bonds discipline and profit
from governments, and in the same way debt disciplines and profits from individu-
als, rent disciplines and profits from creativity and community.
This is not simply a case of naive artists, musicians, gallerists, and other
“creative types” being manipulated by diabolical rentiers and ruthless speculators.
Rather, the financial sector functions as a realm to explore and to experiment with
means for capturing creative energies more broadly. If we understand the sought-
after and distinctive dimensions of creative neighborhoods — t heir networks of
cooperating individuals and institutions — as a kind of commons, then real estate
speculation both enables and profits from a nuanced form of enclosure. Finance
permits the commodification of these creative commons indirectly, selling individu-
als and firms access to unique and attractive neighborhoods along with the promise

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of higher future returns as property prices increase. While capital cannot directly
capture the neighborhood’s common creativity without risking its demise, financial-
ization offers a means by which capital can derive value and help shape this collec-
tive creative labor.
Creativity and Its Derivatives

The idea of creativity has emerged in — and has enjoyed a particular salience and
resonance as part of — a much broader set of social, economic, political, and cultural
transformations associated with post – Bretton Woods financialization. Conversely,
this financialization has been enabled, understood, and operationalized, in part,
through recourse to the idea of creativity. Thus far, I have sought to identify what
the idea of creativity does as a political, economic, social, and cultural tool, rather
than what creativity is. As I explained earlier, this working idea of creativity is itself
a delimited and historically situated discursive construction. Creativity operates
as a “floating signifier,” as Stuart Hall would put it — t hat is, a powerful and tena-
cious idea, which, while it has little positive substance and is often vaguely defined,
remains a key part of the discursive landscape of power. As Hall notes, in reference
to dominant notions of gender and race, floating signifiers ultimately rely on their
often unspoken antonyms or opposites. So, for example, the definition of hegemonic
“male” or “white” identities relies less on a positive set of traits and more on their
subjugated and devalued others, “female” and “nonwhite,” respectively.82 What is
creativity’s overlooked antonym or opposite that allows its meaning to effectively be
suspended and expediently mobilized in the webs of discourse and power?
At least within the art world, where the idea of creativity is almost embar-
rassingly juvenile, the slur hurled against those perceived to lack this ineffable qual-
ity is that of being “derivative.” In other words the artistic effort in question is seen
to be overly dependent on the style or idea of another work, from which its artistic
impulse “derives,” rather than originating something new and, thus, being creative.
For artists, the distinction between “creative” and “derivative” is fraught and anx-
ious, with other artists, curators, critics, and buyers acting as tastemakers who (often,
it seems, entirely arbitrarily) can decide on what side of the line an effort might fall.
Of course, the line between “creative” and “derivative” has become hard to
find in postmodern, post-avant-garde times, especially as the technologies of art’s
mechanical and digital reproduction have fostered incredulity toward the fetish of
the artist’s touch and the myth of originality. Entire art movements have emerged
precisely to challenge the distinction between the creative and the derivative, their
figureheads including, for example, Marcel Duchamp, who introduced industri-
ally manufactured “readymades” into the gallery space, and, notably, Andy Warhol,
whose serialized prints and quasi-industrial art manufacturing techniques “worked”
precisely because they destabilized the traditional distinction between the creative
and the derivative. As Mark C. Taylor notes, today’s superstar artists like Jeff Koons,

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Takashi Murakami, and Damien Hirst have taken this logic to the next level, mining
the ironies of the creative/derivative seam not only by incorporating kitsch, popu-
lar culture, and other “profane” elements into their work but also by implementing
postindustrial production techniques and leveraging finance’s own speculative pro-
cesses into massive branded art enterprises.83 It is no accident that, of late, specula-
tive fevers have dramatically driven up the prices for contemporary art as financier-
collectors recognize in the ironies and ecstasies of the postmodern canvas not only
an “alternative asset class” ripe for profitable gambling but a reflection of their own
aetherwork at the intersection of the creative and the derivative.
Drawing on the previous discussion of portfolio theory, we might think about
how the line between the creative and the derivative can help us understand the
global division of labor that separates those workers who are deemed worthy of
celebrity, security, and high remuneration from those abject souls worthy only of
precarious drudgery. Within the logic of financialized capitalism, one’s natural cre-
ativity, prudently invested and disciplined, will become valuable to the system, and
one will be sought after by employers to lend oneself to their creative efforts. Mean-
while, those who lack or fail to take advantage of their natural creativity will fall into
those positions that are largely “derivative”: doing what others tell them, having little
or no opportunity for creative expression, and doing work that largely creates value
for others. While creativity is certainly not the main axis of oppression and exploita-
tion on a global scale, there is much insight to be gained by plotting today’s “haves”
and “have-nots” in terms of the “creatives” and the “derivatives.”
But the derivative has a felicitous second meaning. Within financial parlance,
a derivative is a secondary investment vehicle, an asset whose value depends on or
refers to the movement of another. Derivatives are typically contracts between two
financial actors that give one or the other the option of buying or selling another asset
at a specified future time. These include “futures” contracts (agreements to purchase
a certain quantity of a certain asset at a future date); “options” (like futures, but which
permit one party to opt out of the deal when the date arrives); and “swaps” (including
the infamous “credit default” variety, which gives a party the option of exchanging one
asset for another — often currency — if certain conditions are met). Derivatives also
enable buyers to purchase only certain dimensions of an underlying security, as when
banks bundled (or “securitized”) subprime mortgages, then sold different “tranches”
of those mortgage packages to different investors interested in different levels of risk
exposure. Effectively, derivatives allow investors an extremely precise tool for tailor-
ing exposure to risk, enabling a much more meticulous and sophisticated construc-
tion of portfolios.84 Further, derivative contracts have become tradable commodi-
ties in and of themselves, allowing financial actors to develop a speculative trade in
derivatives — that is, create further derivative products out of multiple primary deriva-
tive contracts. Since the 1970s, the volume of derivative contracts and exchanges has
skyrocketed such that by 2006, the notional value of over-the-counter derivatives was

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worth over 600 percent of the global GDP.85 This “fictitious capital” tremendously
influences economies and markets large and small, as it rushes in and out of national
currencies and government bonds, and global agricultural and energy products, not to
mention mortgages, real estate, and corporate shares.
For Martin, the implications of the derivative go deeper. At the heart of the
derivative is the imperative to manage risk, to leverage small investments into huge
returns by commodifying and reselling probabilities, and a logic of “preemptive”
futurity, which seeks to transform future uncertainty into present-day risk com-
modities. The derivative represents a new contagious logic or pattern of social and
institutional cognition and organization, one that spreads through and influences
various social, economic, and governmental spheres. For instance, Martin illustrates
the way this approach has influenced and been influenced by US military strat-
egy, where preemptive “investments” of high-tech “shock and awe” warfare in key
“hotspots” are intended to leverage massive “regime change,” aimed at mitigating
“global risks” and installing governments that will make the world safer for trans-
national capital flows.86 He also shows how this logic plays out in new forms of neo-
liberal governance, which no longer see vulnerable citizens as a responsibility but
see them as “at risk” populations in need of preemptive intervention to help them
better manage risk (“financial literacy” campaigns, deregulation to allow predatory
lending, “investments” in silver bullet – type programs aimed at giving youth “a hand
up”).87 For Martin, this spread of the logic of the derivative is not simply finance
overstepping its proper bounds, nor is it merely symptomatic of a global social and
economic scene dominated by financial pressures. It represents a fundamental shift
in the nature of wealth and capital itself, one germane to a rapidly globalizing world
where the connections between and dynamics of economic processes are more
chaotic than ever. Financial derivatives are an example of an emergent technology
for measuring and controlling the flux of human labor and social cooperation as it
becomes unfathomably more interconnected.
In this sense, Martin finds in the derivative both a leitmotif of post – Bretton
Woods capitalism and a theoretical and historical heuristic device. By attending to
the “logic” of the derivative, we can begin to develop an awareness of the way appar-
ently independent or incongruous processes within global capitalism fit together
within an overarching paradigm, the way different, seemingly disconnected pro-
cesses “derive” value, structure, and meaning from one another. It is this process I
have been employing throughout this essay, attempting to pull together the seem-
ingly unrelated appearances and manifestations of the idea of creativity from across
a variety of sectors in ways that hold together the political, the economic, the social,
and the discursive.
All the examples of creativity’s appearance in and facilitation of post – Bretton
Woods financialization I have cited derive in some fashion from one another and
help create the environment for one another’s emergence — t hat is, they draw

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strength and meaning from their intertextual connections. And as I hope to have
shown, they all derive from and in turn help create the historical circumstances of
financialization in which we now find ourselves.
I close by noting that the discourse of creativity I have been analyzing across
these multiple sites is not entirely derivative. In other words, it is not purely a hege-
monic function of finance capital, born merely of ideological necessity to beguile and
charm us into compliance with a financialized system not in our interests. The idea
of creativity, for all its falsity and incompleteness, speaks to an honest and heartfelt
need and capacity for newness, self-expression, community recognition, and change
that we all feel acutely, most intensely to the extent that we are denied the opportu-
nities to achieve them in our increasingly alienating and precarious lives and work.
Within the various deployments of creativity in all the examples cited throughout
this essay, we can grasp a kernel of negation: the promise of creativity works on us
because we are all, in different ways, caught up in the derivative logic of capital that
apprehends us (even our creative expression and capacity) as a means to derive profit
and surplus value. The power of the idea of creativity derives at least in part from
the implicit power of that thing which is harnessed, subjugated, and constrained
within the financialized system in which we live: the power to cocreate our world,
the power of living labor from which all individuals and institutions are derived. We
must remember that creativity became a central discursive element of post – Bretton
Woods capitalism in response to and as a way to co-opt the struggles of the 1960s
and 1970s. Like other seemingly assimilated and clichéd notions, including “democ-
racy,” “social justice,” and “equality,” creativity can be a tool of negation and of pos-
sibility. To paraphrase Benjamin, to mobilize an idea like creativity does not mean
to articulate “the way it really is.” It means to seize hold of it as it flashes up at a
moment of danger.88
Notes
1. For revealing accounts of the cultural and subjective dimensions of finance, see Karen
Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2009); David Stark, “The Cognitive Ecology of an Arbitrage Trading Room,” in The Sense
of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2009), 118 – 62; and Caitlin Zaloom, Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from
Chicago to London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
2. Elsewhere I have sought to add nuance to this formulation. While it is true that finance is
an abstraction and representation of “real” value (“fictitious capital,” in Marx’s felicitous
phrase), this is no less true of money or capital in general. See also Leigh Claire La Berge,
“The Rules of Abstraction: Methods and Discourses of Finance,” in this issue. Max Haiven,
“Finance Depends on Resistance, Finance Is Resistance, and, Anyway, Resistance Is
Futile,” Mediations 26, nos.1 – 2 (2013): 85 – 106.
3. On the sort of short-term, blindered thinking that animates financial worlds, see Ho,
Liquidated, 274 – 94.
4. For an excellent overview and analysis, see Doug Henwood, Wall Street: How It Works and
for Whom (New York: Verso, 1998).

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5. See, for instance, Julia Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors’
Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); and Maurizio Lazzarato,
The Making of the Indebted Man, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2012), 96 – 102.
6. See Steve Fraser, Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life (New
York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 525 – 72; and Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee, Financial
Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). On
post-2008 developments, see Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids,
and the Long Con That Is Breaking America (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2010).
7. Randy Martin, An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk
Management (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 10 – 12.
8. John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and
Consequences (New York: Monthly Review, 2009), 56.
9. See Fraser, Every Man a Speculator, 573 – 615; Ewald Engelen, “Corporate Governance,
Property, and Democracy: A Conceptual Critique of Shareholder Ideology,” Economy
and Society 31, no. 3 (2002): 391 – 413; and Julie Froud et al., “Shareholder Value and
Financialization: Consultancy Promises, Management Moves,” Economy and Society 29,
no. 1 (2000): 80 – 110. See also Ho, Liquidated, 169 – 212.
10. Indeed, as Michael Hudson, David Graeber, and others point out, government debt should
rightly be seen as a sort of tithe or disciplinary force and a means by which social wealth,
through taxation, is transferred to the financial sector. Michael Hudson, “From Marx to
Goldman Sachs: The Fictions of Fictitious Capital, and the Financialization of Industry,”
Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory 38, no. 3 (2010): 419 – 44; David Graeber, Debt: The
First Five Thousand Years (New York: Melville House, 2011). See also Walden Bello,
Nicola Bullard, and Kamal Malhotra, eds., Global Finance: New Thinking on Regulating
Speculative Capital Markets (London: Zed Books, 2000).
11. See Julie Guard and Wayne Antony, eds., Bankruptcies and Bailouts (Halifax: Fernwood,
2009).
12. LiPuma and Lee, Financial Derivatives, 161 – 89.
13. See Greg Albo, Sam Gindin, and Leo Panitch, In and out of Crisis: The Global Financial
Meltdown and Left Alternatives (Oakland, CA: PM, 2010).
14. Martin, Empire of Indifference, 19 – 41.
15. Michael Hudson, The Bubble and Beyond: Fictitious Capital, Debt Deflation, and Global
Crisis (Dresden: ISLET, 2012).
16. See Louis Hyman, Debtor Nation: A History of America in Red Ink (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2011).
17. Randy Martin, Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002).
See also Paul Langley, The Everyday Life of Global Finance: Saving and Borrowing in
Anglo-America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
18. Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm, Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of
Finance (New York: Penguin, 2011), 82 – 83.
19. Graeber, Debt, 361 – 93.
20. See Max Haiven, “Finance as Capital’s Imagination? Reimagining Value and Culture in an
Age of Fictitious Capital and Crisis,” Social Text 29, no. 3 (2011): 93 – 124.
21. Arjun Appadurai, “A Nation of Business Junkies,” in The Occupy Handbook, ed. Janet
Byrne (New York: Black Bay, 2012), e-book.; Cathy Greenfield and Peter Williams,
“Financialization, Finance Rationality, and the Role of Media in Australia,” Media, Culture

on 04 July 2018
and Society 29, no. 3 (2007): 415 – 33; Micky Lee, “Time and the Political Economy of
Financial Television,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 36, no.4 (2012): 322 – 39.
22. Armin Beverungen, Stephen Dunne, and Casper Hoedemaekers, “The University of
Finance,” Ephemera 9, no. 4 (2009): 261 – 70.
23. Martin, Financialization of Daily Life, 91 – 107.
24. See David McNally, Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance
(Oakland, CA: PM, 2011), 113 – 145; and Johnna Montgomerie, “The Pursuit of (Past)
Happiness? Middle-Class Indebtedness and American Financialisation,” New Political
Economy 14, no. 1 (2009): 1 – 24.
25. Martin, Financialization of Daily Life, 55 – 101.
26. Ulrich Beck, World at Risk (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2009); Jacob S. Hacker, The Great Risk
Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement and How You
Can Fight Back (New York: Oxford University Press), 2006.
27. Dietmar Meyer, “Creativity, Human Capital, and Economic Growth,” Society and Economy
21, no. 4 (1999): 117 – 29. For an example of this thinking in action, see Steve Forbes and
Elizabeth Ames, How Capitalism Will Save Us: Why Free People and Free Markets Are the
Best Answer in Today’s Economy (New York: Random House, 2011).
28. Silvia Federici, “Commoning against Debt,” Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy, no.
4 (2013): 20, tidalmag.org/issue4/commoning-against-debt; “Feminism, Finance, and the
Future of #Occupy: An Interview with Silvia Federici,” by Max Haiven, ZNet, November 25,
2011, www.zcommunications.org/feminism-finance-and-the-future-of-occupy-an-interview
-w ith-silvia-federici-by-max-haiven.
29. Bill Gates, “Creative Capitalism” (address delivered at World Economic Forum 2008,
Davos, Switzerland, January 24, 2008), www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/exec/billg
/speeches/2008/01 – 24WEFDavos.aspx.
30. See Milford Bateman, Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work? The Destructive Rise of Local
Neoliberalism (London: Zed Books, 2010); see also Stephen Young, “The ‘Moral Hazards’ of
Microfinance: Restructuring Rural Credit in India,” Antipode 42, no. 1 (2010): 201 – 23.
31. See Francesca Sawaya, “Capitalism and Philanthropy in the (New) Gilded Age,” American
Quarterly 60, no. 1 (2008): 201 – 13.
32. On this historical transition, see Oliver Zunz, Philanthropy in America: A History
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).
33. See Philip E. Kovacs, ed., The Gates Foundation and the Future of US “Public” Schools
(New York: Routledge, 2010).
34. Kenneth J. Saltman, The Gift of Education: Public Education and Venture Philanthropy
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
35. Julie Guthman, “Thinking inside the Neoliberal Box: The Micro-Politics of Agro-Food
Philanthropy,” Geoforum 39, no. 3 (2008): 1241 – 53.
36. Stephen J. Ball and Antonio Olmedo, “Global Social Capitalism: Using Enterprise to Solve
the Problems of the World,” Citizenship, Social and Economics Education 10, no. 2 (2011):
83 – 9 0; see also Bateman, Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work?
37. Michael Kinsley, ed., Creative Capitalism: a Conversation with Bill Gates, Warren Buffett,
and Other Economic Leaders (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009).
38. On the history of finance’s forms of discursive legitimation as a productive and generative
economic engine (as opposed to mere gambling), see Marieke de Goede, Virtue, Fortune,
and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
39. Ho, Liquidated, 67 – 72.

on 04 July 2018
40. See David Harvey, “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction,” Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science 610, no. 1 (2007): 21 – 44.
41. See David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2006), 176 – 97; and
Michael Perelman, Marx’s Crisis Theory: Scarcity, Labor, and Finance (New York: Praeger,
1987).
42. Hudson, Bubble and Beyond, 129 – 56.
43. See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1984).
44. Franco “Bifo” Berardi has meditated on the “poetic” dimensions of financial accumulation:
Franco Berardi, “Emancipation of the Sign: Poetry and Finance during the Twentieth
Century,” E-Flux, no. 39 (2012), www.e-flux.com/journal/emancipation-of-the-sign-poetry
-and-finance-during-the-t wentieth-century.
45. Harvey, “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction.”
46. Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan, Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built
to Last Underperform the Market — and How to Successfully Transform Them (New
York: Crown, 2001); Lee W. McKnight, Paul M. Vaaler, and Raul L. Katz, eds., Creative
Destruction: Business Survival Strategies in the Global Internet Economy (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press).
47. Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (New York: Viking, 1995); Gates, Business @ the Speed of
Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy (New York: Warner Books, 1999).
48. See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1985), 82 – 84.
49. See Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi, eds., The Construction of Authorship: Textual
Appropriation in Law and Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994).
50. See Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1993); and Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art (New York:
New York University Press, 1984).
51. See Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish, eds., introduction to “What Is the Radical
Imagination?,” special issue, Affinities 4, no. 2 (2010): i – x xxvii.
52. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliot (New
York: Verso, 2005); Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A
Potential Politics, ed. Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno (Minneapolis: University Minnesota
Press, 1996), 133 – 50; Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e),
2003).
53. See George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968
(Boston: South End, 1987); and Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans.
Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oakland, CA: PM, 2012).
54. Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics
(Boston: Beacon, 1978); Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist
International in a Postmodern Age (New York: Routledge, 1992).
55. Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism, 167 – 272; see also Suely Rolnik,
“The Geopolitics of Pimping,” trans. Brian Holmes, in Critique of Creativity: Precarity,
Subjectivity, and Resistance in the “Creative Industries,” ed. Gerald Raunig, Gene Ray, and
Ulf Wiggenig (London: Mayfly, 2011), 23 – 40.
56. See the wealth of critique available in Raunig, Ray, and Wiggenig, Critique of Creativity;
and Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter, eds., MyCreativity Reader: A Critique of Creative
Industries (Amsterdam: Institute on Network Cultures, 2007).

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57. Angela McRobbie, “ ‘Everyone Is Creative’: Artists as New Economy Pioneers?,” Open
Democracy, August 29, 2001, www.opendemocracy.net/node/652; McRobbie, “The Los
Angelesation of London: Three Short Waves of Young People’s Micro-Economies of Culture
and Creativity in the UK,” in Raunig, Ray, and Wiggenig, Critique of Creativity, 119 – 32.
58. See George Ritzer and Nathan Jurgenson, “Production, Consumption, Prosumption: The
Nature of Capitalism in the Age of the Digital ‘Prosumer,’ ” Journal of Consumer Culture
10, no. 1 (2010): 13 – 36; and Max Haiven, “Can Pikachu Save Fannie Mae? Value, Finance,
and Imagination in the New Pokéconomy,” Cultural Studies 26, no. 4 (2012): 516 – 41.
59. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992): 3 – 7.
60. Lazzarato, Making of the Indebted Man, 72 – 77.
61. Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor.”
62. Lazzarato, Making of the Indebted Man, 106 – 7.
63. Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video
Games (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 2009).
64. See Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).
65. See LiPuma and Lee, Financial Derivatives, 33 – 34.
66. This sort of subjectivity is often illustrated (perhaps hyperbolized) in film and literature,
including Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. See Alison Shonkwiler, “Don DeLillo’s Financial
Sublime,” Contemporary Literature 51, no. 2 (2010): 246 – 82.
67. For example, in publications like Mary Buffett and David Clark, The Tao of Warren Buffett
(New York: Scribner, 2006); Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the
Business of Life (New York: Bantam Books, 2008); and Jay Steele, Warren Buffett: Master of
the Market (New York: Avon, 1999).
68. See also Angela McRobbie, “Fashion Culture: Creative Work, Female Individualization,”
Feminist Review 71, no. 1 (2002): 52 – 62.
69. See Jason Read, “What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Philosophy of Karl Marx: The
Politics and Ontology of Living Labor,” in The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the
Prehistory of the Present (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 61 – 102.
70. Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini (New York: Continuum,
2003); Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt, “In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labor,
Precariousness, and Cultural Work,” Theory, Culture and Society 25, nos. 7 – 8 (2008): 1 – 30.
71. Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy,
trans. Gregory Conti (New York: Semiotext(e), 2008).
72. Massimo De Angelis, The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capitalism
(Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto, 2007); Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework,
Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, CA: PM, 2012).
73. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure,
Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2004); Brian Tochterman,
“Theorizing Neoliberal Urban Development: A Genealogy from Richard Florida to Jane
Jacobs,” Radical History Review, no. 112 (2012): 65 – 87.
74. Richard Florida, “The Creative Compact,” The Huffington Post, July 10, 2012, www
.huffingtonpost.com/richard-florida/the-creative-compact_b_1614218.html.
75. See Sarah Brouillette, “Creative Labor,” Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group
24, no. 2 (2009): 140 – 49.
76. Jim McGuigan, “Doing a Florida Thing: The Creative Class Thesis and Cultural Policy,”
International Journal of Cultural Policy 15, no. 3 (2009): 291 – 300; David Hesmondhalgh,

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“Cultural and Creative Industries,” in The Sage Handbook of Cultural Analysis, ed. Toby
Bennett and John Frow (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008), 552 – 6 9.
77. Anne E. Bowler and Blaine McBurney, “Gentrification and the Avant-Garde in New
York’s East Village,” in Paying the Piper: Causes and Consequences of Art Patronage, ed.
Judith Huggins Balfe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 161 – 82; Andrew Harris,
“Financial Artscapes: Damien Hirst, Crisis, and the City of London,” Cities 33 (2013):
29 – 35; Daniel Makagon, “Bring on the Shock Troops: Artists and Gentrification in the
Popular Press,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7, no. 1 (2010): 26 – 52.
78. See Fredric Jameson, “The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism, and Land
Speculation,” New Left Review, no. 228 (1998): 25 – 46.
79. See, e.g., Mark Banks, “Creative Cities, Counter-Finance, and the Aesthetics of Exchange:
Copenhagen’s Artmoney Project,” Cities 33 (2013): 36 – 42; and Ted Rutland, “The
Financialization of Urban Redevelopment,” Geography Compass 4, no. 8 (2010): 1167 – 78;
80. David Harvey, “The Art of Rent: Globalization, Monopoly, and the Commodification of
Culture,” in Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (New York: Routledge, 2001),
394 – 411.
81. See Maurizio Lazzarato, “The Misfortunes of the ‘Artistic Critique’ and of Cultural
Employment,” in Raunig, Ray, and Wiggenig, Critique of Creativity, 41 – 56.
82. See Stuart Hall, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?,” Social Justice 20,
nos. 1 – 2 (1993): 104 – 14.
83. Mark C. Taylor, “Financialization of Art,” Capitalism and Society 6, no. 2 (2011), capitalism
.columbia.edu/files/ccs/Mark%20C.%20Taylor.pdf. We can also see how the financial sector
is increasingly interested in developing speculative methods for capturing the creative
potentials of the art world in the transition to a much more highly refined and financialized
form of art collecting, including the emergence of art investment funds. See Noah
Horowitz, Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2011).
84. See LiPuma and Lee, Financial Derivatives, 33 – 34; and Martin, Empire of Indifference,
31 – 32.
85. Foster and Magdoff, Great Financial Crisis, 58.
86. Martin, Empire of Indifference, 64 – 9 6.
87. Ibid., 21 – 42.
88. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah
Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 253 – 64.

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The Creative and the Derivative

Radical History Review

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The Everyday Creativity of Post – Bretton Woods Financialization

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around the globe and by the development of an array of ultrasophisticated financial

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of skills, experience, and competencies to be hawked to employers. Arts and culture,

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of ratings agencies) as nearly risk-­free holdings. Such is the fundamental tenor of

Creative Capitalism and Venture Philanthropy

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market-­driven solutions are needed (rather than, say, a fundamental redistribution

Angels of Creative Destruction

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The Discipline of Creativity

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interreferential, and even contradictory short-­term investments as part of an overall

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ment.78 In other words, neoliberal urban redevelopment is eminently financialized;

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Creativity and Its Derivatives

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of ratings agencies) as nearly risk-free holdings. Such is the fundamental tenor of

market-driven solutions are needed (rather than, say, a fundamental redistribution

interreferential, and even contradictory short-term investments as part of an overall