This article was downloaded by: [190.215.147.

121]
On: 27 January 2014, At: 17:33
Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Journal of Latin American Cultural

Studies: Travesia
Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjla20

Precarious Creativity: Youth In A PostIndustrial Culture

Nstor Garca Canclini
Published online: 08 Nov 2013.

To cite this article: Nstor Garca Canclini (2013) Precarious Creativity: Youth In A PostIndustrial Culture, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesia, 22:4, 341-352, DOI:
10.1080/13569325.2013.847566
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2013.847566

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the
Content) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,
our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to
the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content
should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,
proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever
or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or
arising out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &
Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/termsand-conditions

Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2013

Vol. 22, No. 4, 341352, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2013.847566

Nestor Garca Canclini

PRECARIOUS CREATIVITY: YOUTH IN A

Downloaded by [190.215.147.121] at 17:33 27 January 2014

POST-INDUSTRIAL CULTURE

[Lecture given at Boston University as part of the Lectures in Criticism series on

September 13, 2012. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston]
If bookstores close, does that mean people are not reading any more? If fewer
people go to movie theaters and many blockbusters have disappeared in recent years, is
it because people are seeing fewer and fewer movies? Attempts to answer these
questions sometimes emphasize the impact of innovative technologies on the
production and circulation of books, records and videos. In other cases, such attempts
highlight changes in the populations cultural habits while others note the decline in
consumption in many countries due to economic crises and loss of consumers buying
power. How much weight does each of these factors have in the changes that are
happening regarding the production of and access to cultural goods? The social sciences
have developed sophisticated research on a global scale about the corporate structure of
industries, communication networks, and the reordering of markets in processes of
globalization and digitalization. However, this wealth of information doesnt culminate
in a general model for understanding the current links between economy and culture,
the relationship between industrial forms of organizing creativity and creative
movements outside the market logic that prevails in communication industries.
This uncertainty creates precariousness on all levels. Major companies sales of
records and videos that had risen throughout the twentieth century collapse, music
stores go under and creators also lose their jobs. I want to propose some lines of
analysis that have come out of anthropological studies about creative young people in
Madrid and in Mexico. Faced today with the difculty of using a deductive line of
thinking that, in a more stable world, derived the meaning of personal actions from
class structures, education, nation, or ethnicity, we understand that subjects organize
what they do as actors-in-network, in combined and multiple networks that they
choose or assemble according to their needs and opportunities. Making a science of the
social, in the direction proposed by Bruno Latour, requires tracking associations and
ways of constructing agency and resolving conicts. Monitoring the actors in networks
is not to opt for the point of view of individuals instead of structures, but rather to take
the actors relative liberty of innovation seriously.
We chose to do an ethnographic monitoring of creative young people in visual arts,
music, independent publishing and digital practices. We began with the hypothesis that
the new generations are the sector most affected by the changes of the era, most ready
to recognize the obsolescence of earlier models of cultural development and practice
q 2013 Taylor & Francis

Downloaded by [190.215.147.121] at 17:33 27 January 2014

342

LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

new forms of economic organization and in-network technology. Will it be possible to

infer a diagnosis of tendencies that are reorienting cultural production from the
experimental behaviors of these young people? In the rst place, the behaviors of new
generations lead us to rethink the meaning of the concepts of creativity, work,
precariousness, economics and cultural communication with which weve been
dealing.
The concepts of precariousness and creativity have grown in social signicance.
Studies have examined precariousness in indigenous communities, in poor urban
sectors and in other subaltern groups; now it is necessary to consider new processes
that make the lives of everyone in contemporary societies precarious. We know that
precariousness has become a normal trait of exible capitalism. It has become normal
that many jobs are unstable, poorly paid and of low quality, and that unemployment
and underemployment without xed incomes or benets, and without legal or medical
insurance, are on the rise. Even some members of the governing class are resigned to
the fact that those affected look for resources in illegal activities. International surveys
such as Latinobarometro note that in eighteen countries in Latin America, insecurity
linked to unemployment and crime is the principal social concern and a reason for law
suits led against governments.
To these experiences we add the instability aggravated year after year by
technological innovations. Skills learned in school, from reading on paper to social
theories, lose value in a world of screens and digital connections that demand incessant
re-learning. In addition, fashion and advertising that have brought us in less than a
decade from the cell phone to the iPod and iPhones 1, 2, 3, and 4, from the
photocopier and cassettes to CDs, to downloads and to YouTube, from email to
Facebook and Skype, intensify the obsolescence of technologies and formats.
A symptom of how our relationship with time has been destabilized and our link to
the future has become precarious is the disappearance of the word plan (planicar).
The disuse of this verb implies that our capacity to act has changed above all to act
politically. This also supposes the deactivation of zones of knowledge that were
prestigious until a few years ago, such as prospective studies, and the questioning of
disciplines that sought to make available knowledge capable of anticipating or planning
the future: economics, sociology, and planning. We could say that the social sciences
have been replaced, in their predictive interest, by biotechnology, ecology and
computer science: these disciplines announce to us the future of technology and its
impact on nature, bodies and some aspects of communication.
Lets look then at how young people position themselves in the face of these
changes. On one hand, an increasing number of young people hold positions as
directors, create innovative companies in strategic areas (computer science, digital
services, audiovisual entertainment and in the so-called creative industries), or they
adhere to non-traditional forms in the job market. In this way, the greatest number of
consumers of music, videos and advanced technologies is concentrated in younger
generations.
The other side of this same process is made up of the great number of young people
who contribute the greatest percentages to unemployment and informal employment
statistics and, in many countries, also contribute to the convoys of migrants, to the
statistics of violent deaths like those of soldiers, hit men or victims of urban violence or
narco-terrorism. In these cases, young people, who used to be thought of as the future,

Downloaded by [190.215.147.121] at 17:33 27 January 2014

PRECARIOUS CREATIVITY

are the present, not only in the sense that it is not necessary for them to wait for the
future to achieve their goals but because they have little future. More than half of those
interviewed in the National Survey of Youth carried out in Mexico in 2005 preferred
the phrase, the future is so uncertain that it is better to live for today.
The report produced two years ago by the Iberian American Youth Organization
has already revealed that in Latin America young people are the sector most vulnerable
to irregular jobs, with the worst salaries. In Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and
Peru, while 50.3% of adults have informal employment, among young people between
15 and 29 years old the percentage jumps to 82.4% (Calderon 2010: 6).
From a CEPAL study that correlates similar data with the educational progress of
young people, Martn Hopenhayn notes the following paradoxes: young people have
greater educational achievements than adults, measured above all in years of formal
education, yet they have less access to employment. They control new forms of
information with greater facility, but fewer of them can access the spaces dedicated to
political deliberation, and they are less often afliated with parties. They exponentially
expand symbolic consumption but not material consumption (Hopenhayn 2008: 53).
In other words, young people enjoy more education and less access to employment
than the adult population. They have more years of formal schooling than
previous generations, but at the same time they double or triple the unemployment
index relative to those generations. In other words, they are more integrated into the
processes dedicated to the acquisition of knowledge and human capital formation,
but are more excluded from the spaces in which such human capital is exercised, that is,
the world of labor and the source of income for their own well-being (Hopenhayn
2008: 53).

Questions about creative economy

Within this disadvantageous placement of young people, we are interested in learning
about the strategies and tactics with which new generations look to create
employment, insert themselves in niches of creativity and sociability, and group
themselves around projects that give them opportunities greater than those existent in a
stagnant society. We currently nd, above all in big and mid-sized cities, young people
using educational, cultural, and technological capital in innovative ways that give them
skills that are different than those predicted by social history.
We know that creativity, as a decisive resource used to achieve competitive
advantage, has penetrated industries the automotive industry and those of food
products or services and incorporates media and fashion trends. Authors such as
Arjun Appadurai (2001: 21) and Richard Florida maintain that creative imagination is no
longer solely in the hands of agents in specialized elds, such as the artistic eld; it now
forms part of daily work in industries such as computational and graphic design, music
and digital animation (Florida 2002: 5).
We speak then of a creative class or a creative economy, that in the United
States and Europe includes 25 to 30% of the labor force. With these terms, Florida
refers to the rise of a new creative ethos prompted by the expansion of values previously
found only in artists, musicians, scientists or professors located in the economic
margins of the older model of work and leisure. Besides reordering the links between

343

Downloaded by [190.215.147.121] at 17:33 27 January 2014

344

LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

work hours and free time, this creative class looks for work in stimulating
environments, with self-management and peer recognition.
The ambivalent or contradictory experiences with supposed creative cities and the
criticism of the notions of creative economy or creative class (McRobbie 2007,
2010; Rowan 2010) require that we use caution with these terms. We have preferred
to begin with ethnographic monitoring of and in-depth interviews with the selected
actors, through snowball sampling, as key gures in visual arts, independent publishers and
musical and digital practices in Mexico City, with the goal of getting to know their selfdescribed creativity, new types of work and business models, and the networks in
which they are inscribed or that they invent. Faced with the lack of censuses of artists,
musicians, and independent publishers in Mexico, or reliable statistics about their
activities and economic productivity, we completed ethnographic observations in
institutions, companies, and sites of action in order to identify protagonists or gures to
be used as reference. In this way, for each of the three indicated areas, we obtained
maps of the actors most recognized by their peers, the most important training and
professional performance spaces, events or scenes, projects and cultural centers. We
conducted interviews and ethnographic monitoring at the openings of expositions,
fairs, concerts, and festivals and monitored everyday behavior.
What should we call these young people? Some are called trendsetters, others are
cultural entrepreneurs, others creative subjects, others precarious workers. We have taken into
account those references in the identication and observation of actors and behaviors,
trying not to impose their own ways of describing and stating their actions.
The majority of cases deal with particular types of workers, neither salaried nor
completely independent. They work by short-term projects, without contracts, going
from one project to another, without ever having a structured career. Frequently, they
mobilize their skills and creativity in corporate processes, different every time. They
must adapt to clients or diverse jobs, to variations in teams, and to the different
signicance that artistic and cultural jobs acquire in different settings. The limited
income and fragility of their duties oblige them to combine creative tasks with
secondary activities. In France, where they are called intermittent workers, their
activity is characterized as continuous discontinuity, which is followed by
commitments and projects (from Heusch, Dujardin and Rajabaly 2011: 23).
In Madrid as well as in Mexico the biographical and group trajectories of these
young people contradict two very widespread narratives. They dont support the story
of the new economy that says that a talented, enterprising young person,
imaginatively using his or her knowledge and connective capital, can transcend
inequalities and become, for example, the owner of Facebook. These trajectories also
raise questions about the easy praise of freelancers creativity: as the studies by Angela
McRobbie in London and Jason Rowan in various Spanish cities show, the fascination
with traveling, the freedom to work day or night, and the ability to be connected 24
hours a day tends to be related to administrative tasks and paperwork, meetings,
working longer hours, not having weekends, and the stress of self-management.
By devoting themselves to what they like to do, without worrying about becoming
rich that is the utopian, bohemian part of these independent entrepreneurs
eventually they have to consider whether they will be enterprises or companies even
if they are small and how to interact with the general economy to become
sustainable.

PRECARIOUS CREATIVITY

Downloaded by [190.215.147.121] at 17:33 27 January 2014

One characteristic that makes cultural production today very different is the
multimedia interconnectivity among creative elds that were formerly separate
visual arts on one hand, music on the other, with publishers and other forms of mass
media entirely unconnected. Now we see cultural producers with the exibility to
negotiate different elds simultaneously, or link up with practitioners of other forms of
culture. What do visual artists, music and independent publishers have in common
today?
Among others, these characteristics:
(a) More openness to what is happening outside of their own countries, to a great
extent on the planet.
(b) Disposition to be permanently connected, and to therefore diminish the
difference between work time and leisure time.
(c) The capacity to be a multi-tasking artist, musician or publisher: this means, on
one hand, simultaneously using diverse media and connections (they write on the
computer while they tend to networks, Facebook, Twitter, and sometimes they
have the television on as well). On the other hand, this versatility becomes
apparent in trades that used to be separate in traditional artistic practices: the
author of music or of a work of visual art can see to the design of objects, publicity
and promotion in networks.
(d) More ability than previous generations to establish long-distance social
interaction and cooperative networks; in some cases, micro-communities that
expand the possibility of obtaining jobs and disseminating results; moving from
social capital referred to particular spaces (neighborhood, school, factory) to
linking capital (Putnam), which allows multiple insertions in diverse spaces
changing the identications in which different capital is valued.
(e) Practices of hyperlinking, intertextuality and interdisciplinarity: in the
structure of works that incorporate procedures such as copy/paste, control-z and
Bluetooth, that is, the disposition towards transparency and incessant exchange.
Digital networks facilitate versatility among different trades, forms of
collaboration and even languages and countries, but this versatility is also a requirement
that the exible labor market and the uncertainty regarding the future of jobs
normalizes.
The behavior of these young people practically shows a different way of
approaching relationships between creativity, interdisciplinarity and cultural
institutions. In another era, interdisciplinarity was an epistemological program or
one of interrelations between artistic practices, languages and formats, with the goal of
renewing works and knowledge, practiced only by a minority within the scientic or
artistic eld. Today this style of work extends to sampling and music remixing,
intertextuality in writing, collaboration between disciplines and the combination of
visual, literary, and technological discourses.
A consequence for the creators and disseminators of this interdisciplinary
restructuring that is mobilized outside institutions, or within them, is a change of
language. The notions of artistic eld, the publishing eld and the music eld, so used
in the sociology of arts and literature inspired by Pierre Bourdieu, give way to others.
To describe the object of study or action, young people speak of setting, environment,
circuits or platforms, more comprehensive terms. While the notion of a eld alluded to a

345

346

LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

specialized and self-contained system with particular rules that were articulated for
example, in the eld of music, composers, performers, concert halls, promoters and
audiences speaking of scenes or circuits facilitates, on the other hand, including a
wide (and mixed) diversity of internal and external actors in a more exible way than
what was previously called a eld.

Downloaded by [190.215.147.121] at 17:33 27 January 2014

From creators and intermediaries to programming-circulation

Creators and specialized cultural institutions are not the only factors that renew the
production and communication of a culture. Are bookstores and record stores
necessary in an age of downloads and symbolic goods? In Mexico, while the numbers
are not as catastrophic as they are in the United States, many places that sell books,
music and videos have closed. Other forms of mediation, such as various weekend
cultural supplements, have disappeared and music and theater criticism has declined, as
has the number of book reviews.
It is not that cultural development is being reduced to a simple equation: creatorspublicity-downloads-readers/spectators. In the visual arts, we have seen creativity
redistributed since the emergence of curators who structure not only how an exhibit is
set up, but also the conceptual sense of an artist or various tendencies that intervene in
the moment of production, authorship, and dissemination.
In music, the DJ, sound engineers and others that post-produce using materials
previously created by artists also modify the sites of production, circulation and
appropriation. Despite the derivative character of their work, many DJs dene
themselves as creators. They change, in this way, the interaction between the creative
moment, previously understood as solitary and individual, and the sites of
communication, listening, dancing, and parties. Just as restaurants, banks and design
stores congure the meaning of art by showing works, music made by young people
circulates less and less in record stores even in albums and mixes with activities
that take place in cafes, audiovisual media, museums, multipurpose cultural centers
and above all on internet sites and social networks. The signicance of artistic goods
and the criteria for assessment are reformulated in extended settings where clothing
fashion, gastronomic tastes, values of speed and entertainment in cultural industries,
and the hipster zones of Mexico City, such as the districts Condesa, Roma, and the
Historic Center, are also at play.
The most utopian texts about this mix of roles among producers, intermediaries
and receptors speak of prosumers, another one of the names used to designate young
creative actors. However, it does not seem that the exchange of roles and the partial
experiences of altering the traditional order of production-circulation are equal in
creative power for all artists, writers and publishers. As a number of studies about the
publishing world note, there are nodes, strategic points where circulation is controlled
and reoriented. Art biennials, big music festivals and the major book fairs maintain
their hierarchies. There is still the mainstream, structures with certain funnels that lter
diversity. These strategic points, cities or institutions are taken by alternative actors as
a reference, even if they create controversy. Idealized visions of horizontality and
decentralization that would make digital advances possible are tempered when we
consider that one of most powerful and biggest monopolies is Google: a number of

Downloaded by [190.215.147.121] at 17:33 27 January 2014

PRECARIOUS CREATIVITY

researchers, such as Robert Darnton, call attention to its growing role as a major
selector and organizer of contemporary culture and even of the history of culture
(Darnton 2009).
Among the spaces and circuits studied, music appears as the eld in which the old
concentrated structure of cultural industry (in this case controlled by four giant majors)
is less sustainable. From the appearance of Napster to the current multiplication of P2P
networks, we have seen exchange privileged over economic gain. Collective
authorship, cooperation among composers and audiences, collaborative creations, and
editions put together over distance between musicians residing in different countries
are some of the frequent innovations in the music scene. In summary, two
consequences are particularly noteworthy: (a) the expansion of access to creation and
communication, differentiating less between professionals and amateurs; (b) a change
of horizon, not only in terms of rules, but in the conguration of intellectual property.
Another sign of the dynamism of the transformations in the music scene is the need
to distinguish, even limiting ourselves to a range between 20 and 35 years old, three
generations: the digital, formed by bands that have come out of the last decade, that
above all use social networks and web platforms; the compilations generation,
participants who adhere both to the rules of the traditional industry and to those of
digital circuits, organized in the form of self-management; the record generation,
composed of musicians integrated into the industry, some of whom negotiate insertion
into digital networks with their predecessors.
How does technological innovation modify the creative process and the habits of
audiences? Composition on personal computers and the use of online platforms and
cloud computing increase the already mentioned long-distance collaboration and
modify the industry notion of copyright, giving way to partially open licenses, of the
creative commons sort. As in the visual arts and the publishing world, digital
technologies increase access to information about cultural offerings in their own
country and in the world. We could say that radios and above all Internet sites curate
tastes when it comes to music. This interactive public, with so many ways to access
and re-create what they hear, is a selective and expansive disseminator: Facebook,
Twitter, YouTube and blogs constantly expand the circulation of music and music
videos, orient preferences and convene supporters to form groups.
We went from a period in which cultural development was conceived in a linear
way (creators-middle men-public) to another in which creation is reformulated as
programming, that is, creative use of preexisting materials and of their changes in
circulation. Now we nd cultural creativity in the conception of the project as well as
in communication and reception, which intermingle without any sequential order.

From career to projects

Another change that is visible when we compare cultural producers from twenty or
thirty years ago with current ones is the transition from a society in which a career
could be had to another in which employment opportunities are scarce and, when they
are obtained, are almost always unreliable temporary appointments. Young artists and
musicians claim that they are used to working with short-term and medium-term
projects. Some undertake independent enterprises because of their convictions, the

347

Downloaded by [190.215.147.121] at 17:33 27 January 2014

348

LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

majority out of necessity. Creativity and innovation, two traits highly valued in order
to obtain work, more than lasting professional skills, contribute to giving these
activities their fragile timeframes. The pressure of the instantaneous, what is
discovered or reported today, reinforces this relationship with the quick temporality of
biographies: everything is ephemeral, renewable and then obsolete, even the groupings
that young people organize in order to be able to work.
This transitory sense of enterprises conspires against performance in cultural
practices that require substantial investments and whose capacity for economic
recovery is slow. The commercial and working patterns of the publishing industry,
where production takes months and its meaning is fed, in part, by a catalogue shaped
over years, come into conict with the intermittency of jobs and the coercio of the
market that give rise to obsolescence and incessant renovation.
An area that is particularly sensitive to acceleration and uncertainty is the transition
from paper editions to virtual circuits. On one hand, international bibliography and
statements by foreign and Mexican publishers speak of the possible substitution of
books by digital circulation. We see a growing preoccupation to adapt publishers and
bookstores so that they subsist in an era of in-network production and transmission of
content. On the other hand, the independent publishers we interviewed cling to
projects on paper, are opposed to catastrophism as part of their resistance to the
tyranny of the market, and defend the production of books conceived to be read, to
last. They value the artisanal aspects of the production (the quality of the paper and
design, the typographic innovations, the qualitative sense of interpersonal
communication and aesthetically justied reading.)
Beginning four years ago, one of the centers dedicated to young art in Mexico
City, the Carrillo Gil Museum, has opened a space for independent publishers for
exhibition, promotion and analysis every December. In 2011, the Forum housed more
than sixty publishers from different countries, taking up an entire oor in the museum.
Upon entering, anyone would notice the festive air, the mix of magazines, fanzines,
visual objects or publications referring to lm, video and of course books. In these we
see signs of artistry, like visible hand stitching, covers with singular marks, and art
books alongside conventional-looking editions but that reveal a desire to revitalize the
editorial object beginning with its classic attributes. The book has died, long live the
book was the slogan that headlined the enterprise that year.

An uncertain future
Lets return to the questions we asked at the beginning: Is the system of publishersbookstores-reading on paper being lost forever? The study of habits, forms of grouping
and organization, young peoples styles of work and survival do not show, as we have
seen, a generalized and homogeneous restructuring. It is not possible to group together
different processes in a single transition to a creative economy that would encompass
all of them or to speak of the catastrophic disappearance of cultural industries and
types of communication that became hegemonic in the second half of the twentieth
century.
What we nd, on the other hand, is that the industrial and postindustrial (digital)
forms of producing and circulating goods and messages coexist with old communal

Downloaded by [190.215.147.121] at 17:33 27 January 2014

PRECARIOUS CREATIVITY

habits, new communities and types of businesses and that tastes for mass culture are
combined with new forms of artisanal work and the collective search for innovative
solutions and ways of sharing expertise. More than substituting one system for another,
enterprises appear as complements in multiple processes of learning, friendships along
with collaboration with big institutions, collaborations and competition, selfemployment and imaginative insertion in preexisting networks.
The study of these new actors generates questions about the type of society that
creates work with unstable and non-continuous projects. The testimonies of those
interviewed reveal the ambivalent character of these changes. A visual artist was telling
me that she sometimes works as a cultural producer and other times as a digital
designer: Between my bachelors and masters degree, I studied for nine years. I know
English and French, and I am capable of working in different trades. But I dont nd
work that lasts: I taught courses, I take jobs with temporary contracts, and between
them I can go for three months without earning anything. I cant expect them to give
me a loan to buy a car or give me leave if I get pregnant.
It is also necessary to assess, along with extended creativity, the consequences of
this social and economic reorganization for cultural production and the meaning of
living with each other. While this way of working by the project, hiring people and
then letting them go, allowing some to free themselves from routine and innovate in
diverse tasks, makes the economy dynamic, it also hurts many. In the words of Richard
Sennett, it corrodes character and weakens social solidarity. To what does he refer
when he says this? It especially corrodes those aspects of character that unite people
and offer each one of them the sense of a sustainable self (Sennett 2000: 25).
Sometimes social meaning reaches the point that it becomes illegible. Extreme
exibility and instability can make us less creative, incapable of facing difculties.
Analyzing what happens in automated bakeries provides a simple example. Workers
see icons that represent the color of bread, its temperature and cooking time, but they
lose any sense of the different physical appearance of all types of bread Italian,
French and of the intimacy of the work process: in reality the bakers no longer
know how bread is made. Automatic bread is not a marvel of technological perfection;
machines sometimes make mistakes with the bread they are cooking, for example, and
they do not correctly calculate the strength of the yeast or the real color of the bread.
The workers can play with the screen to correct these defects a little; what they cannot
do is x the machines or, more importantly, manually prepare bread when the
machines break down, something that happens quite often. Workers depend on a
computer program and, as a result, they cannot have practical knowledge of the trade.
The work becomes illegible to them, in the sense that they no longer know what it is
that they are doing. (Sennett 2000: 70 71).
It is not only a problem of technical efcacy. We can see the confusion people
baking feel about themselves as bakers. In all forms of work, from sculpture to serving
meals, people identify with tasks that challenge them, tasks that are difcult. But in this
exible workplace, with its polyglot workers coming and going irregularly, radically
different orders coming in each day, the machinery is the only real standard for order,
and so has to be easy for anyone, no matter who, to operate. Difculty is
counterproductive in a exible regimen. By a terrible paradox, when we diminish
difculty and resistance, we create the very conditions for an uncritical and indifferent
activity on the part of the users (Sennett 2000: 74 75).

349

Downloaded by [190.215.147.121] at 17:33 27 January 2014

350

LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

On the other hand, while the uncertain and always changing character of work
relations can attract us because it breaks up routine, it also creates amorphous
networks, disorganizes our sense of time and disconnects us from the time of others.
The problem that we face is how to organize our personal lives now, in a capitalism
that uses us and disposes us to drift (Sennett 2000: 123).
I would like to reassess these statements by Sennett, written twelve years ago, in
the light of what we today perceive with the advances of the internet and social
networks. For many young people who want to create visual art and do not manage to
exhibit their work in galleries or museums, the alternative on line and off line scenes are
facilitating the self-creation of other ways of becoming informed, creating and
communicating. We are proving that, faced with lters resulting from the
concentration of editorial and musical production in a few companies, new avenues of
creation of magazines, blogs and sites of exchange open social networks to creativity,
an interaction that goes beyond the industry of books and albums. With digital devices,
models of transnational independent communication, we see the advent of new
festivals not ruled by commoditization. They give access to visual arts, literary and
musical creation, sectors and even countries that used to be excluded.
The attention paid to the behavior of young people allows us to register not only
vulnerability resulting from the contraction of the job market, but also their capacity
for agency, the innovative use of cultural and social capital. They are not trapped in the
crisis of the publishing or music industries. They move towards horizons that were not
predicted by the classic development of these industries.
However, many dark territories appear, like those discovered by Sennett when he
studied the executives and experts at IBM who were let go when they were just over 30
years old because of the companys remodeling, or those who are left adrift, without
references, between factories that are closing and new circuits of digital production
that dont let them in.
What can be done with these failures? Studies about trendsetters tend to praise the
versatility of subjects that are thought of as a collage of fragments in evolution, always
open to new experiences. But what happens with psychological instability when people
constantly live with experiences of short-term jobs? Sennett says: there is little space
to understand the collapse of a career if we believe that the whole history of a life is
only a collection of fragments. Neither is there space to analyze the seriousness and
pain of failure if it is no more than another incident (Sennett 2006: 140). Sennett, like
other anthropologists and sociologists, sees in this solitary precariousness the origin of
new desires for community that can be perceived in the resurgence of religions and
we can add today in the multiplication and exposition of social networks that create
virtual communities.
Sennett reminds us of Paul Ricoeur when he maintained that in order to feel the
stimulus to create and grow it is important to know that someone depends on me and
that I am responsible for my action before another. Each person can maintain his or
her motivation and creativity constantly imagining that there is a witness for all that we
say and do, and that, in addition, this witness is not a passive observer, but rather
someone who condes in us. In order to be reliable, we must feel needed: in order to
feel needed, this Other must be in a situation of lack (Sennett 2006: 153).
When we live in a state of fascination, jumping from one job to another, it is more
difcult to ask ourselves, Who needs me? Rather, we settle into dizzying transitions

PRECARIOUS CREATIVITY

that generate indifference. Connective, in-network capitalism is a system that radiates

indifference; just as in markets the winner takes all, where the connection between risk
and compensation is not very visible. It is not based on condence; there is no reason to
be needed. In this way the system produces the restructuring of institutions in which
people are treated as disposable. These practices obviously and brutally reduce the
sense of mattering as a person, of being needed by others (Sennett 2006: 153).
What change could be made to overcome indifference? This is the last sentence of
Sennetts book: I dont know which political programs follow from those internal needs,
but I do know that a regime that doesnt offer human beings any profound need to take
care of each other cannot preserve its legitimacy for very long (Sennett 2006: 155).

Downloaded by [190.215.147.121] at 17:33 27 January 2014

Translated by Victoria Livingstone

References
Appadurai, Arjun. 2001. La modernidad desbordada. Dimensiones culturales de la globalizacion.
Mexico: Trilce-FCE.
Calderon, Veronica. 2010. La juventud perdida de Latinoamerica. El Pas, Friday, August
14, p. 6.
Darnton, Robert. 2009. The Case for Books: Past, Present and Future. Canada: PublicAffairs.
De Heusch, Sara; Anne Dujardin and Helena Rajabaly. 2011. Lartiste entrepreneur, un
travailleur au projet. In Lartiste un entrepreneur? Collection under the direction of
Bureau detudes de SMartBe Bruxelles: Les Impression Nouvelles, SMartbe.
Florida, Richard. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How Its Transforming Work, Leisure,
Community and Everyday Life. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Hopenhayn, Martn. 2008. Inclusion y exclusion social en la juventud latinoamericana.
Pensamiento Iberoamericano. Inclusion y ciudadana: perspectivas de la juventud en
Iberoamerica, num. 3, 2nd stage, biannual journal.
McRobbie, Angela. 2007. La losangelizacion de Londres: tres breves olas de
microeconoma juvenil de la cultura y la creatividad en Gran Bretana. Epic.net.
http://eipcp.net/transversal/0207/mcrobbie/es (accessed June 20, 2011).
McRobbie, Angela. 2010. Industria cultural. In Ideas recibidas. Un vocabulario para la cultura
artstica contemporanea. Barcelona: Actar.
Putnam, Robert D. 2003. El declive del capital social. Un estudio internacional sobre las
sociedades y el sentido comunitario. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg-Crculo de Lectores.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1992. Oneself as Another. Trans. K. Blaney. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press: 165 8.
Rowan, Jaron. 2010. Emprendizajes en cultura. Discursos, instituciones y contradicciones de la
empresarialidad cultural. Madrid: Tracantes de suenos.
Sennett, Richard. 2000. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the
New Capitalism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Sennett, Richard. 2006. La corrosion del caracter: las consecuencias personales del trabajo en el
nuevo capitalismo. Barcelona: Anagrama.

351

Downloaded by [190.215.147.121] at 17:33 27 January 2014

352

LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

Nestor Garca Canclini is an Argentine anthropologist and academic who has taught at
the University of Texas Austin, Duke, Stanford, as well as universities in Barcelona,
Buenos Aires, and Sao Paulo. Garca Canclini is currently a distinguished professor in
the department of Anthropology in the Metropolitan Autonomous University
(Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana) of Itzapalapa in Mexico City. Garca Canclini is
renowned for his work on concepts including hybridity, modernity, postmodernity and
urbanity in Latin America, as well as the relationships between aesthetics, art, and youth
cultural networks. Among his fundamental works are the books Transforming Modernity:
Popular Culture in Mexico (Spanish title Las culturas populares en el capitalismo)
(1982), Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (Culturas hbridas:
Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad) (1990), Consumers and Citizens:
Globalization and Multicultural Conicts (Consumidores y ciudadanos. Conictos
multiculturales de la globalizacion) (1995), La globalizacion imaginada (1999), and
Diferentes, desiguales y desconectados. Mapas de la interculturalidad (2004). He has
received numerous fellowships, awards and other recognitions, including a Guggenheim
Fellowship, the Casa de las Americas prize for his book Las culturas populares en el
capitalismo, the Book award from the Latin American Studies Association for his book
Culturas hbridas, and most recently an award from the Organization of Ibero-american
States.