Zoë Druick initiated a fantastic reading group here at SFU which we’ve dubbed the “Creativity and Critique reading group”. As the title of the group suggests, we mostly read through works that examine the intersection between critique and creativity. We originally started with Boltanski and Chiapello’s fantastic “The New Spirit of Capitalism” and have since moved on to a number of parallel works including, most recently, Boltanski’s “On Critique”. Today we will have our first meeting on Angela McRobbie’s “Be Creative”. I’m just through the first two chapters but I have found her use of Foucault to develop a creativity dispositif to be very promising for future research. This is particularly relevant for this project since she links this dispositif to a ‘middle-classification’ process that professionalizes precarious creative work (p.40).

‍

“My argument here is that we see a kind of new assemblage of the middle class, with a wide range of ‘instruments’ and ‘toolkits’ coming into play to oversee and manage this transformation. The creative workforce may be relatively small, but it is being trained up to pave the way for a  new post-welfare era.”  [p.35]

‍

I’m looking forward to discussing some of these ideas with the rest of the group today. More to come on comments and reflections on the book.