[rohrpost] Re: Creative Cities

[Matteo Pasquinelli]

My contribution for the event The Artist and Urban Development
organised by Skulputerenpark in Berlin few months ago, maybe of
your interest... M



---

http://rekombinant.org/docs/Beyond-the-Ruins-of-the-Creative-City.pdf
* Abridged version


Matteo Pasquinelli

Beyond the Ruins of the Creative City: Berlin's Factory of Culture
and the Sabotage of Rent



Coming of age in the heyday of punk, it was clear were living at the
end of something - of modernism, of the American dream, of the
industrial economy, of a certain kind of urbanism. The evidence was
all around us in the ruins of the cities... Urban ruins were the
emblematic places for this era, the places that gave punk part of its
aesthetic, and like most aesthetics this one contained an ethic, a
worldview with a mandate  on how to act, how to live... A city is
built to resemble a conscious mind, a network  that can calculate,
administrate, manufacture. Ruins become the unconscious of a city,
its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and  in this truly bring
it to life. With ruins a city springs free  of its plans into
something as intricate as life, something that can be explored but
perhaps not mapped. This is the same transmutation spoken of in fairy
tales when statues and toys and animals become human, though they
come to life and with ruin a city comes to death, but a generative
death like the corpse that feeds flower. An urban ruin is a place
that has fallen outside the economic life of the city, and it is in
some way an ideal home for the art that also falls outside the
ordinary production and consumption of the city.
        - Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost1



 From Detroit to Berlin: history of the underground culture through
the paradigm crisis.

Faster than any other form of art, music is said to incarnate but the
unconscious of technology and dominant means of production, and in
particular their crisis, the shift from paradigm to paradigm. Whereas
Futurism welcomed the age of machines for the masses, punk and post-
industrial music, in contrast, paid tribute to the disintegration of
Fordism and colonised the relicts of suburban factories as a habitat
for new forms of life. Despite their industrial fetish, Throbbing
Gristle, the most experimental and filthy of UK punk bands, declared
as early as 1976  their drive for "information war"2,  while in
Germany computer music become popular thanks to Kraftwerk (literally,
'power station'). In the late 80s techno music appeared in Detroit:
the original sound of the Motor City incorporating the synthetic
presentiment of the coming digital machines.3 The term 'techno' was
inspired to Juan Atkins by Alvin Toffler's book The Third Wave, where
the first 'techno rebels' were described as the pioneers of
information age.4 Detroit techno was the analogue rhythm session of
Fordism innervated by the harmonics of the first microchips.
Thereafter when digital code became the hegemonic paradigm of
information, underground music went even more modular, cognitive and
minimal (switching from TR-909 drum machines to Max/MSP software, to
simplify it in a technical formula).5 After diverse evolutions, the
parable of the Detroit techno has found its way today into the Berlin
clubs under the mainstream and micro-hedonist genre of 'minimal
techno'.6 This basic genealogy of electronic music (skipping the
predictable theories of sampling and remix culture) is to pose a
simple question: where is the underground today? The horizontality of
networks and digital matrix seems to have erased hierarchies and
authorship but also the old reassuring topological notion of the
underground. If the underground was precisely a parasitic form of
life in the interstices of dominant mode of production, its urban and
electronic infrastructures, where can we find its new incarnations in
relation to the contemporary technology and metropolis? If the
factories became informational and immaterial like even punks
predicted, which relics is the art underground going to colonise in
the next future? Which ruins and material memories will the digital
matrix leave behind?
       The notion of the underground belongs obviously to the age of
industrialism, when society had a clear class division and was not
yet atomised into a multitude of precarious workers and free-lancers.
7 For decades, the innervations of the industrial apparatuses formed
the machinic imaginary of subcultures, also providing many urban
interstices to populate. If the underground culture was the by-
product of Fordism, such a spatial and political  dimension seems to
evaporate in the age of the network society, the well-educated
'creative' commons and corporate Free Culture. Where is the
underground resistance in the age of financial capitalism and
volatile stock markets?8 The contemporary phenomenons of
financialisation and gentrification are examples of new techniques of
valorisation (based on speculative rent) still to be comprehended by
cultural activism and art world. Today the global credit crisis
affected specifically these new models of business and has suddenly
shifted many political and cultural coordinates. Gentrification as it
has been experienced in Berlin and the European 'creative' cities may
encounter its doppelgänger. Today's 	American nightmare is
paradoxically the 1$ house and 'detroitification' is the neologism
that describes this vertical collapse of the industrial sector, the
real estate market and the very social fabric of US cities. Before
knowledge economy and gentrification processes were fully understood,
cultural production found itself in the new scenario of financial and
credit crisis. In a city like Berlin the underground has become a
'factory of value' (mainly for real estate speculation and city
marketing), but now the destiny of cultural production has to be
rethought within the current global crisis.


The invisible skyline of the cultural city: the frictions of the
immaterial.

In Berlin the colonisation of the relicts of Fordism is still a
fascinating and complex history: not only the vestiges of previous
totalitarian regimes, but also the schizophrenic stratification of
failed urban plans form the geology and the humus of the cultural
world.9 Today this stratification includes a thick immaterial layer
of cultural and symbolic capital, which is catalysing the 'creative
city' buzz and well-known processes of gentrification. There is
therefore an immaterial architecture yet to be uncovered, or more
specifically, an economy of the immaterial that is fed unconsciously
by the art world and underground subcultures. This issue is related
once again to the question: what kind of underground culture is
possible in a time of spectacular economy? What looks like a
nostalgic question points in other ways to the political autonomy of
the 'social factory' of culture and to new coordinates for cultural
agency that may be more effective on the economic ground. The
hypothesis advanced here is that the contemporary form of
'underground' has to be found along the new chain of value
accumulation - along the new ruins of financial crisis. The good old
underground has become part of the cultural industries and the
spectacular economy, as well as our life has been incorporate by a
more general biopolitical production (that is the whole of our social
life has been put to work). On a cynical note, this question of the
neutralisation of the underground concerns also business. What's the
future of gentrification if there are no more subcultures that
produce 'added value' and make it circulate across the city?
       The literature which promotes the 'creative cities' (such as
the work of Richard Florida)10 or denounces their hidden neoliberal
agenda and social costs is extensive. This text approaches the
ideological construct of the 'creative city' (and similar models)
from a different angle in order to attempt a reverse engineering of
its economic mechanism. Usually both liberal partisans or radical
critics of 'creative economy' employ a symmetrical paradigm, where
the material and the immaterial domains are defended in their
autonomy and hegemony against each other. Therefore, the metropolis
is respectively described along the urban fabric or the symbolic
capital, the good old material economy or the supposedly virtuous
economy of 'creativity'. On the opposite, this text tries to
underline the conflicts, frictions and value asymmetries that occur
along the material and immaterial domains; the material accumulation
of value triggered by cultural production; the autonomy of the social
factory of culture against the skyline of the 'creative' cities.
Hopefully in this way the invisible motor of the cultural city can be
grasped, possibly re-engineered and effectively inverted.
Conceptually, three notions are introduced here. First, the concept
of the factory of culture, that is the social production of culture
versus the established Creative Industries and the institutional
policies of the 'creative cities'. Second, the profound asymmetries
of cultural commons and the accumulation of value between the two
layers of symbolic production and material economy (as it happens for
instance with gentrification: such conflictive concretions of value
can be considered as the very 'ruins of the Creative City'). Finally,
the notion of creative sabotage of creative rent is suggested as a
political response to gentrification and exploitation of cultural
capital (such a sabotage of value is 'creative' as it builds over the
financial and real estate 'ruins' and is constitutive of the common).


The factory of culture and the metropolis

The concept of factory of culture is opposed to notions like culture
industry, Creative Industries or 'creative cities.11 The contemporary
production of culture is far more complex, machinic, social and
conflictive than what the fashionable and institutional models of
creativity promote: it is indeed a 'factory'. The old notion of
subculture was developed as a alternative to the paradigm of dominant
culture with a deep concern for a positive and productive identity.
Postmodernism came to destroy the reassuring dialectics between
highbrow and lowbrow culture, but never developed a proper economic
model or value theory. The figure of the factory of culture addresses
on the opposite a key productive role for the cultural world within
what Mario Tronti described as 'social factory'.12 There are many
social factories of immaterial labour in today's economy and each
would deserve specific attention: education, art, digital networks,
and so on. Underlining culture as a factory means also to show the
machinic complexity of economy and to criticise the dominant reading
of the commons as a territory virgin of any capitalist exploitation.
Contrary to the interpretation of Free Culture apostles like Lawrence
Lessig and Yochai Benkler, the commons of culture are not an
independent domain of pure freedom, cooperation and autonomy, but
they are constantly subjected to the force field of capitalism.13 The
commons of culture are a form of life, always productive and
conflictive, and often also easy to exploit.
       In particular, at the twilight of the society of the
spectacle, a dense material economy is discovered at the core of
cultural production. Debord's controversial aphorism can finally be
reversed: "The capital is spectacle to such a degree of accumulation
that it becomes a skyline of cement".14 After decades of parallel
evolution, two strata of recent history have converged in a unique
dispositif: the urban revolution (as Lefebvre described the city in
the 1960s, a motor of autonomous production and capital accumulation)
15 and the cultural industry (as the Frankfurt school inaugurated the
transformation of culture in business and 'deception').16 The name of
this newborn chimera is 'creative cities' - an asymmetrical  chimera,
as the mask of culture is used to cover the hydra of concrete and
real-estate speculation. The chimera of cultural cities is a complex
machine, no longer based on the opposition between high and low
culture that was central to the Frankfurt School canon of the culture
industry. Specifically, culture production is today a biopolitical
machine where all aspects of life are integrated and put to work,
where new lifestyles become commodities, where culture is considered
an economic flow like any other and where, in particular, the
collective production of imaginary is quickly hijacked to increase
the profits of corporate business. 17


The asymmetries of value in the cultural sphere: the 'artistic mode
of production' and the 'collective symbolic capital'.

Under different respects, the hegemonic business model of cultural
economy is rent. "Rent is the new profit", as Carlo Vercellone has
put it.18 To be clear, rent is the motor of valorisation behind
gentrification, for it exploits the common resource of land or
cultural capital without being particularly productive. Forms of rent
are also monopolies over software patents, communication protocols or
network infrastructures (Microsoft, Google, Facebook just to bring
few examples from the digital sphere). If profit and wage are the
vectors of capitalist accumulation under industrialism, monopoly rent
and exploitation of the cultural commons are the business models
specific to knowledge-based economy, or cognitive capitalism.19
Behind the new forms of gentrification there is a significant link
between real estate speculation and cultural production - a link that
is still not enough clear in many art circles.
       Neil Smith was the first to introduce gentrification as the
new fault line between social classes in his seminal book The New
Urban Frontier.20 In his principal model the gentrification of New
York is described through the notion of rent gap: the circulation of
a differential of ground value across the city triggers
gentrification when such a value gap is profitable enough in a
specific area.21 David Harvey further expanded the theory of rent to
include the collective production of culture as a terrain that the
market exploits to find new 'marks of distinctions'. In his essay The
Art of Rent that describes the gentrification of Barcelona, Harvey
introduces the notion of collective symbolic capital: real estate
business exploits the old and new cultural capital which has
gradually sedimented in a given city (in forms of sociality, quality
of life, art, gastronomic traditions, etc.).22 Harvey's essay is one
of the few texts to underline the political asymmetries of the much-
celebrated cultural commons. Harvey links the intangible production
and accumulation of real money not through the regime of intellectual
property but along the parasitic exploitation of the immaterial
domain by the material one. The collective symbolic capital is
another name for the capitalist exploitation of the commons - a form
of exploitation that does not need violent enclosures (a sort of
'capitalism without private property' that many activists of Free
Culture do not recognize).
       The notion of collective symbolic capital is crucial to reveal
the intimate link between cultural production and real estate
economy. The collective symbolic capital is accumulated in different
ways. In a traditional way, it is the historical and social memory of
a given locale (the case of Barcelona covered by Harvey). In an
modern way, it can be produced exploiting urban subcultures and the
art world  (describing the rise of the loft culture in the New York
of the '80s, Sharon Zukin defined a specific artistic mode of
production oriented to making neighbourhoods more attractive for
business).23 Or, in a more artificial way, it can be generated by the
PR campaigns of city councils eager to join the club of the creative
cities (according to the strategies of  Richard Florida). Already
1984 Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Ryan explained similar techniques in
their classic article "The Fine Art of Gentrification".24
       Despite their different urban latitudes, Berlin and Barcelona
share a similar destiny. The old underground of Berlin attracted and
then boosted gentrification, just as in Barcelona. Later, over this
cultural milieu, a second-order strategy developed large urban plans
related to the media industries. In Barcelona the 22@ urban plan was
designed to regenerate the former industrial district of Poble Nou
under the fashionable concept of 'knowledge city'.25 Similarly, in
Berlin the project 'Media Spree' aims to transform a big area on the
Spree River into a new pole for culture industries.26 The area is
well known for its underground music scene, and there is a stark
contradiction that reveals more than a hundred analyses: to promote
this area, the magazines of the investment companies are using the
imagery of the same clubs that they put under eviction.27 Also the
Berlin Biennale showed interest for the urban battlefield: the 2008
edition featured the project Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum as one of
its main venues. Skulpturenpark is an "urban void" owned by various
private companies and individuals, formerly part of the
"Mauerstreifen" (the militarized zone within the Berlin Wall) and now
overgrown with weeds.28 It started not simply to host public art
projects for the biennale but also to question the controversial role
of artists in relation to the urban space. The arrest of Andrej Holm
in July 2007 for his research on gentrification occurred in this
broad urban context - an arrest that made clear to a wide audience
the scale of economic interests and police attention around the new G
word.29 Considering that even Walter Benjamin complained about
bohemian bars being invaded by the new rampant middle class (in the
1930s!), a century-long conflict could be traced in Berlin alone as a
continental case study.30
       Today the 'artistic mode of production' has become an extended
immaterial factory. Throughout Berlin and the whole of Europe, we are
witnessing the condensation of a peculiar form of cultural capital as
the leading force behind real estate and the 'creative cities'
strategy of city councils eager to attract both investments and
highly skilled workers. As a result, the real estate business, has
established a perverse machinery in alliance with the art world and
cultural producers. Even if for decades the counterculture has been
feeding the spectacle and culture industries with fresh ideas, for
the first time, the current generation of urban subcultures have to
face the immediate concrete by-products of their symbolic labour.


The underground and the sabotage of rent

The most extreme incarnation of the artistic mode of production is
the figure of Damien Hirst whose art has become a purely financial
performance. A former student at Goldsmiths, Hirst ironically
embodied the university's karma (it emerged from a heritage of a
medieval guild of goldsmiths and jewellers!) and radicalised the PR
machine provided to all the Young British Artists by the art
deparment. His most recent artwork is a modern version of The Golden
Calf that has been sold at Sotheby's for 10 million pounds just after
its completion.31 This  piece will be recorded as a milestone only
for one reason: it's the first time an artwork has accessed the open
market by completely skipping the usual mill of galleries and art
dealers. Indeed Hirst started to build over the 'ruins' of the
financial mania. Yet is this cynical over-identification with
capitalism the only destiny left to the underground? Maybe, in the
same way the underground started to colonise post-industrial relicts,
it is time to visualise the post-financial ruins which to build upon.
	However, many proposals coming from politically correct activism or
so-called radical thought still sound quite ineffective. For
instance, the plea 'Be uncreative!' addressed recently by the
collective BAVO represents quite a paranoid attitude. Here we are
still in the typical postmodern cul-de-sac, where each act of
resistance is supposed to reinforce fatalistically the dominant Code.
32 This Lacanian paranoia about a Spectacle able to co-opt any
spontaneous production of culture results eventually in the self-
castration of the living energy of the metropolis. Similarly, also
the idea of sustainable art or  sustainable gentrification, where
artists are supposed to be concerned about their production of
symbolic capital and rent value, is simply naïve. One of the
contradictions of cognitive capitalism is that once symbolic capital
and value are accumulated, it is quite difficult to be de-
accumulated. All these models lack a proper understanding of the
economic model of cognitive capitalism: it is not possible to advance
a proper political response without affecting the accumulation of
surplus-value and ground rent must be confronted with a different
strategy. Recently, Antonio Negri has criticised the forms of 'soft
activism' in the metropolis, or those who believe that the 'political
diagonal' can escape the trap of the 'biopolitical diagram' and so it
would be possible to build 'temporary autonomous zones' like it was
fashionable once.33 In other terms, Negri underlines the fact that
the political action has to affect the economic production and
exploitation, or else it remains an ephemeral gesture. In the case of
cultural and urban gentrification then, the only hypothesis left is
the  sabotage of rent - a sabotage of the value accumulated by
exploiting the common domain of the cultural and symbolic capital and
its redistribution.
       Since the 'creative destruction' of value characteristic of
stock markets has become the political condition of current times, a
redefinition of the cultural commons is needed too.34 A purely
imaginary fabrication of value is a key component of the financial
game as well as gentrification processes. Stock markets first taught
everybody the sabotage of value. Sabotage is precisely what is
considered impossible within the postmodern parlance (where each
gesture supposedly reinforces the dominant regime), or conversely
what Negri himself considered a form of self-valorisation during the
social struggles of the '70s.35 What might occur if the urban
multitudes and the art world enter this valorisation game and recover
a common power over the chain of value production which these day is
revealing its inherent fragility? The new coordinates of the
underground in the age of cognitive and financial capitalism can be
found along these intangible vectors of value, along these invisible
'ruins' of the Creative City, just as once the music underground
started to colonised the industrial relicts or to the invisible
architecture of the first microprocessors. The punk underground grew
out of the ruins of the suburban factories and now we experience a so-
called creative economy parasiting the underground itself: it is time
to imagine the factory of culture getting organised within the ruins
of value that the 'creative cities' are ready to leave behind.



Matteo Pasquinelli
Berlin, December 2008







This text was presented at the Consistory Talk I: The Artist and
Urban Development organised by Skulputerenpark in Berlin on Saturday,
13 December 2008. (www.skulpturenpark.org). A German translation will
be published in: Konrad Becker and Martin Wassermair (eds), Phantom
Kulturstadt: Texte zur Zukunft der Kulturpolitik, vol. II, Vienna:
Löcker Verlag, forthcoming 2009.

Download address for this PDF file: www.rekombinant.org/mat


1 Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, New York: Viking,
2005, p. 88-90. Cited in: Franco La Cecla, Contro l'architettura,
Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008.
2 V. Vale (ed.), RE/Search #6-7: Industrial Culture Handbook,  San
Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 1983.
3 See: Dan Sicko, Techno Rebels: The Renegades of Electronic Funk,
New York, Billboard Books, 1999.
4 Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave, New York: Bantam, 1980: "The Techno
Rebels are, whether they recognize it or not, agents of the Third
Wave. They will not vanish but multiply in the years ahead. For they
are as much part of the advance to a new stage of civilisation as our
missions to Venus, our amazing computers, our biological discoveries,
or our explorations of the oceanic depths".
5 The TR-909 Rhythm Composer is a partially analog, partially sample-
based drum machine built by the Japanese Roland Corporation in 1984.
Max/MSP is a graphical development environment for music written by
Miller Puckette in the mid-80s, but it became renown only in the late
90s. A more intutive and crucial software for the latest generation
of DJs and digital musicians is Ableton Live, whose first version was
released in 2001.
6 For a definition of minimal techno see: Philip Sherburne, "Digital
Discipline: Minimalism in House and Techno," in: Audio Culture:
Readings in Modern Music, New York: Continuum, 2004.
7 See: Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground: An Essay on
Technology, Society, and Imagination, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.
8 Underground Resistance (commonly abbreviated to UR) is also the
name of a legendary musical collective from Detroit that has had a
seminal role in the history of techno music. They are the most
militantly political example of modern Detroit Techno with an anti-
mainstream business strategy. See: www.undergroundresistance.com
9 See: Brian Ladd, Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in
the Urban Landscape, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997;
Philipp Oswalt, Berlin - Stadt ohne Form. Strategien einer anderen
Architektur, München: Prestel Verlag, 2000.
10 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's
Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, New York:
Basic Books, 2002; and: The Flight of the Creative Class: The New
Global Competition for Talent, New York: Collins, 2005.
11 These notions have a different genealogy: respectively originated
and conceptualised by the Frankfurt school ('culture industry'), UK
Government Department for Culture, Media and Sport ('Creative
Industries') and Richard Florida ('creative economy', 'creative
class', etc). If these notions are based on the exploitation of
intellectual property or cultural capital, the 'social factory'
reclaims the common as an autonomous force of production.
12 Mario Tronti, Operai e capitale, Torino: Einaudi, 1966: "The more
capitalist development advances, that is to say the more the
production of relative surplus value penetrates everywhere, the more
the circuit production-distribution-exchange-consumption inevitably
develops; that is to say that the relationship between capitalists
production and bourgeois society, between the factory and society,
between society and the state, become more and more organic. At the
highest level of capitalist development social relations become
moments of the relations of production, and the whole society becomes
an articulation of production. In short, all of society lives as a
function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive
domination over all of society".
13 See: Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology
and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, New York:
Penguin, 2004; Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social
Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2006.
14 'The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it
becomes an image', in: Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, New
York: Zone Books, 1995, thesis 34. Orig.: La société du spectacle,
Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967.
15 Henri Lefebvre, La Révolution urbaine, Paris: Gallimard, 1970;
trans.: The Urban Revolution, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2003.
16 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung,
Amsterdam: Querido, 1947; trans.: Dialectic of Enlightenment (New
York: Herder and Herder, 1972.
17 For a definition of 'biopolitical machine' see: Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
18 Carlo Vercellone, "La nuova articolazione salario, rendita,
profitto nel capitalismo cognitivo", in Posse: Potere Precario, Roma:
Manifestolibri: 2006; trans. by Arianna Bove: "The new articulation
of wages, rent and profit in cognitive capitalism", www.generation-
online.org/c/fc_rent2.htm
19 Ibid.
20 Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier. Gentrification and the
Revanchist City, New York/London: Routledge, 1996.
21 Ibid., p. 67: "The rent gap is the disparity between the potential
ground rent level and the actual ground rent capitalized under the
present land use... Once the rent gap is wide enough, gentrification
may be initiated in a given neighborhood by any of the several
different actors in the land and housing market."
22 David Harvey, 'The Art of Rent: Globabalization and the
Commodification of Culture', in: Spaces of Capital, New York:
Routledge, 2001.
23 Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. In a similar way,
the role of artists and bohemians in the gentrification of New York's
East Village in the 1960s has been highlighted also by Christopher
Mele in Selling the Lower East Side (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000). Not to mention Manuel Castells' work on the
particular role of gay men as 'gentrifiers' in San Francisco during
the early 1980s (Manuel Castells, 'Cultural identity, sexual
liberation and urban structure: the gay community in San Francisco',
in: Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural
Theory of Urban Social Movements, London: Edward Arnold, 1983). These
studies are just a few examples that introduce the theoretical
context hijacked by Richard Florida two decades later and transformed
into banal marketing strategies for provincial towns, re-labelled as
'creative cities'.
24 Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan, "The Fine Art of
Gentrification", October, Vol. 31, (Winter, 1984), pp. 91-111.
25 See: www.22barcelona.com
26 See: www.mediaspree.de
27 See: www.mediaspree.de/Magazin.43.0.html
28 See: www.skulpturenpark.org
29 See: http://einstellung.so36.net/en, http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Andrej_Holm, http://annalist.noblogs.org.
30 Walter Benjamin, 'A Berlin Chronicle', 1932, in: Reflections, New
York: Schocken, 1986: 'Very soon the Romanische Café accommodated the
bohemians, who, in the years immediately after the war, were able to
feel themselves masters of the house... When the German economy began
to recover, the bohemian contingent visibly lost the threatening
nimbus that had surrounded them in the era of the Expressionist
revolutionary manifestoes... The 'artists' withdrew into the
background, to become more and more part of the furniture, while the
bourgeois, represented by stock-exchange speculators, managers, film
and theater agents, literary-minded clerks, began to occupy the place
- as a place of relaxation... The history of the Berlin coffeehouses
is largely that of different strata of the public, those who first
conquered the floor begin obliged to make way for others gradually
pressing forward, and thus to ascend the stage.'
31 Arifa Akbar, "A formaldehyde frenzy as buyers snap up Hirst
works", The Independent, 16 September 2008. Web: http://
www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/a-formaldehyde-
frenzy-as-buyers-snap-up-hirst-works-931979.html
32 BAVO, "Plea for an uncreative city. A self-interview", in: Geert
Lovink et al. (eds), The Creativity: A Free Accidental Newspaper
Dedicated to the Anonymous Creative Worker, Amsterdam: Institute of
Network Cultures, 2007.
33 Antonio Negri, Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu, Anne Querrien,
"Qu'est-ce qu'un événement ou un lieu biopolitique dans la
métropole?", Multitudes #38:  Une micropolitique de la ville: l'agir
urbain, Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2008; trans.: "What makes a
biopolitical space?", www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-01-21-negri-en.html
34 The economist Joseph Schumpeter popularized and used the term
'creative destruction' to describe the process of transformation that
accompanies radical innovation. In Schumpeter's vision of capitalism,
innovative entry by entrepreneurs was the force that sustained long-
term economic growth, even as it destroyed the value of established
companies that enjoyed some degree of monopoly power. See: Joseph
Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1942.
35 Antonio Negri, Il dominio e il sabotaggio. Sul metodo marxista
della trasformazione sociale, Milano: Feltrinelli, 1977; trans.:
Dominion and Sabotage: On the Marxist Method of Social
Transformation, in; Antonio Negri, Books for Burning: Between Civil
War and Democracy in 1970s Italy, London/New York: Verso, 2005.