As early as 2002, the media-hyped »action« character of the anti-globalization movement convinced the marketing department at the global fashion player Diesel to use the street cred and the visual pull of protesting youth for its own purposes. The company has devoted itself to propagating the image »Successful Living«. Everything that smacks of current teen spirit and a lot of pocket money is thrown together into one semiotic stew. In this case, the company decided to use models made up just slightly on the wild, fashion-punk side in just slightly ripped gear, who, with wrathful expressions, held banners towards the camera displaying such slogans as »More Green Traffic Lights« and »Respect Your Mom«, copied from those seen in Genoa and Seattle.

The London-based »Space Hijackers« reacted to this version of entrepreneurial Situationism with a further turn of the détournement screw: they called for a protest movement that, in the style of the demo-appropriation used by the textile multinational, launched a rally against its biggest rival on the market, ostensibly in the name (and in the actual outfits) of Diesel. Slogans like »Don’t believe in the Gap« and »Levis don’t share« on posters and fliers were intended to cause confusion in the realm of brands, while a second stage of this »subvertising« campaign was to see a law suit brought against Diesel, the apparent instigator of this disruption in front of Levis and Gap stores.

It is difficult to say who will pull off the next coup working the attention economy. It is well possible that Diesel will soon discover the cheerful, punky plagiarism concept of Neoist Stewart Home for itself and integrate appropriate footage from the kindred »Space Hijackers« in its next advertising strategy. At any rate, this race between the rabbit and the hedgehog shows how difficult it has become to avoid, in the long run, being heavily influenced by companies and (advertising) media and to position oneself, as the music group Blumfeld called their last album, »Jenseits Von Jedem« [»Beyond Each and Everything«]. Moreover, the arsenal of subversive techniques belonging to sign theory – from charging things with opposite meanings and the conscious rejection of a message to over-affirmation – now also serves the practice of corporative culture jamming. What was once encoded as a media-guerilla tactic of resistance to hegemonic symbolic orders in the society of spectacle now manifests itself as a pseudo-anarchistic, Baudrillardesque »implosion of meaning« that carries out an excessive devaluation of referentiality as a way of completely exploiting the creative potential of dissidence and negation. For, as was formerly the case with the Bohemian world, avant-gardes, sub-cultures and the pop-left, business now also seems to be most of all afraid of boredom and repetition. Poor innovative ability or a lack of agility – both of them skills that have proven themselves in the pop communication system – signal death throes rather than durability. Clever provocation is seen as more efficient than blind conformity, institutionalized critique becomes a driving force to improve efficiency.

Current management strategies – and not only in »creative industries« - operate with the activation of subjective investments, with affective labour, which blurs the distinction between work and leisure and tries to bind the identity of the individual to the work process. In the course of the processes of informatization and the global interconnection of labour, traditional values like hierarchization, conformity and standardization are rapidly being submerged by concepts like flexibilization and self-mobilization, which, as originally emancipatory concepts opposed to the mindless yoke of the Fordian factory, range confusedly from the »Do it!« of the Yippies and the »Do it yourself« of Punk and Bill Gates to the »Just Do It!« of Nike.

Alongside the continued existence of the camp structure of wage-earners in the sweat-shops of this world, »capitalism of difference« calls for a »creative imperative« to guide people’s actions. This change in the concept of creativity has established itself as a demand, half-desired, half imposed, on the contemporary subject, who sets less store by external compulsion than self-motivation and self-regulation. As suggested by the reader »Norm der Abweichung« [»Norm of Deviation«]1, published for the exhibition »Be Creative! The Creative Imperative« in Zurich in 2003, it can be historically interpreted as the democratization of the cult of genius (which has actually long ago, and justifiably, been disposed of) or as the reforming effect of a vigilant capitalism. This type of capitalism has long since adapted »artistic criticism« and its concepts of alternative life projects to the detriment of the basic legitimation of »social criticism«, as Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello write in their book »The New Spirit of Capitalism«2. According to this theory, the widespread desire for more creativity, mobility, freedom and autonomy taken up by social movements after 1968 leads not least to the restructuring of production. The result is the »slimmed-down« company in which people constantly reinvent their workplace. There, company consultants in anarchist masks are working to destroy – admittedly without touching the distribution of property - the bureaucracy that was the central form of administration of the disciplinary society, now considered outdated.

The internalization of the techniques of labour in itself promotes kinds of subjectification that - as the editor of the »Be Creative« reader, Marion von Osten, polemically emphasizes – reverse the relationship between norm and deviation and allow deviation to become the new norm. If, however, this deviation is also part of the process of conditioning, what concept is left to oppose the standardization that has been extended in totalitarian fashion? At this point, Von Osten briefly brings into play the idea of wilfulness, which, as Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt have proven for years on a thousand pages, can never be completely absorbed. But the crucial question of whether and how this wilfulness – itself problematic owing to its political vagueness – can be told apart from the dictate of creativity remains unanswered. The (dialectic?) relationship of norm and deviation also appears somewhat diffuse: What deviation from what norm is exactly meant here? Isn’t deviation – in contrast to negation – defined by the fact that it acts in the end as a course correction to the norm? For, in the end, as opposed to fundamental gestures of rejection as propagated, for example, by the »Glückliche Arbeitslose« [»Happy Workless«] in Berlin, the emphasis of non-conformism, as formulated under conditions of imposed creativity, remains tied to a conformity of a higher order that does not at all take into account the obstinate wilfulness of the subjects.

Certainly, the transitions between event-based self-empowerment and creative problem-solving have become blurred. The narrow line between practices of resistance and those aimed at optimizing systems can now less than ever be defined on a long-term basis. For this reason, it would seem even more urgent to keep enquiring not only after the convergence of means at the level of signs, but also after the divergence of ends in other forms of reality than political space.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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