Week One
1. January
9
Introduction: Creativity in the New Economy
Quotes for Class One
The New Economy
claims to revere creativity and flexibility while the "old
economy" favored order and control. This would be nice, but
is it true? We'll focus on some related questions. What
is the New Econony? Does the New Economy form a true break with
the old economy? What do New Economy people mean by
"creativity"? What is the New Economy's attitude
toward social justice? Finally, can you have creativity without
social justice? This course will take "Silicon Valley"
as a good approximation of the New Economy, and will focus on
the fate of creativity in its business culture.
Assignments:
Clip: Once And
Again, air date 11/28/00
Technology focus: reading texts
FROM
DEINDUSTRIALIZATION TO THE NEW ECONOMY
Question: does capitalism absorb most or
all creativity for its own ends?
In
contrast to the postwar boom, when healthy corporate profits and
rapid productivity growth helped make rising real wages possible,
the onset of the wage squeeze eliminated that luxury. Corporations
were faced with clear alternatives: Either they could revamp their
managerial structures entirely, abandoning the structure of top-down
control established after World War II, in order to forge the
kind of cooperation and gain- and pain-sharing that might have
smoothed the transition to an era of lower and falling profits;
or they could deepen their reliance on top-down control and make
up for the loss of worker incentives that falling wages imposed
with an intensification of supervisory control. They chose
the Big Stick. -- David M. Gordon
"Three types [of consciousness] predominate in America today.
One was formed in the nineteenth century, the second in the first
half of this century, the third is just emerging. Consciousness
I is the traditional outlook of the American farmer, small businessman,
and worker who is trying to get ahead. Consciousness II
represents the values of an organizational society. Consciousness
III is the new generation. . . . Consciousness III postulates
the absolute worth of every human being -- every self. Consciousness
III does not believe in the antagonistic or competitive doctrine
of life." -- Charles Reich, The Greening of America.
"A curious consensus [has emerged]: business and hip are
irreconcilable |enemies, the two antithetical poles of American
mass culture. Whether it is the crude rendering of Jerry
Rubin and Charles Reich or the complex analysis of later academics,
the historical meaning of hip seems to be fixed: it is a set of
liberating practices fundamentally at odds with the dominant impulses
of postwar American society. . . . Despite the homogeneity, repression,
and conformity critique favored by so many avatars of cultural
studies, historians like Warren Susman, William Leach, and Jackson
Lears have pointed out that the prosperity of a consumer society
depends not on a rigid control of people's leisure-time behavior,
but exactly its opposite: unrestraint in spending, the willingness
to enjoy formerly forbidden pleasures, an abandonment of the values
of thrift and the suspicion of leisure that characterized an earlier
variety of capitalism. . . . [For Leach], consumer capitalism
[has taught] a 'concept of humanity' according to which 'what
is most "human" about people is their quest after the
new, their willingness to violate boundaries, their hatred of
the old and the habitual.'" -- Tom Frank, The Conquest
of Cool.
Assignments:
