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Creative labour in Shanghai: Questions on politics, composition and ambivalence

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Abstract

This article introduces and opens discussion on some of the conditions and ambivalences encountered by the rising creative workforce in Shanghai, through engagement with theories of immaterial labour. Drawing from conversations with several Chinese creative workers, the text aims to provoke thought on the potential for political organisation and resistance within fractalised creative sectors mobilised by high levels of innovation, entrepreneurialism, competition and aspiration. By focusing on processes of subjectivation and desire, it calls for considerations of what might constitute political registers in the Shanghainese creative fields.

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Notes

  1. There have been, in recent years, new considerations of what comprises ethnographic method; especially interesting are the debates coming from George Marcus's (2008) comment that recent ethnography has produced ‘no new ideas’. Scholars such as Maximilian Forte (2008) contest that such proclamations ignore ‘new forms of doing, producing, and writing ethnography, especially with reference to cyberspace ethnography’. Furthermore, anthropologists of distributed phenomena such as Christopher Kelty (2008) argue that the breadth of study need not negate its depth. Such debates feed into the understandings of contemporary ethnography taken up by the Transit Labour project. For more on this see Kanngieser et al (forthcoming).

  2. The Transit Labour project comes from the ARC Discovery Grant funded project ‘Culture in Transition: Creative Labour and Social Mobilities in the Asian Century’. Departing from much of the recent China-oriented scholarship, Brett Neilson et al (2010) write that Transit Labour's ‘initiation of research in China is not part of a search for alternative modernities that articulate post-war geocultural visions’, but rather seeks to ‘attend to the multiple processes of bordering that internally divide and connect the continent to wider and differentially scaled circuits of labour, capital, technology, culture and life’ (2010, pp. 1–2). By exploring conflictive and complicit conjunctures, it becomes less about opposing geographical regions and more about the intersections of logistics, labour, governance and subjectivation.

  3. For a list of participants see http://transitlabour.asia/shanghai/. Research partners on the project include Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney, University of Nottingham, Ningbo, Lingnan University, Dipartimento di Politica, Istituzioni, Storia, Universita di Bologna, Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group and Tsinghua University.

  4. All names of interviewees and Shanghainese collaborators have been changed or omitted to protect anonymity. This is necessarily because of very actual instances of political and cultural repression.

  5. For maps see http://transitlabour.asia/blogs/Mapping_Shanghai.

  6. While this labour still ‘involves our bodies and brains as all labour does’, the products of this labour, rather than the labour itself, have become immaterial (Hardt and Negri, 2005, p. 109). At the same time, as Berardi explains, while cognitive activity and intelligence has always been at the heart of human production, whether mechanical, agricultural, artisan or reproductive, in the contemporary scenario, cognitive capacity has become the central resource. ‘Today’, writes Berardi, ‘the mind is at work in so many innovations, languages and communicative relations’ (2009a, p. 34).

  7. Issues of intellectual property, piracy and counterfeiting also need to be mentioned here, especially given the massive hardware and software production industry in China, an industry fraught with labour unrest and exploitation of workers. The new regulations in China requiring tech firms to submit proprietary information (algorithms, source codes, design information) to government agencies are reconfiguring not only where such products are designed and assembled, but also how the economies around innovation are distributed. Ongoing issues around hacking and censorship in China, seen most dramatically in the recent Google relocation of its Chinese servers to Hong Kong, illustrate some of the conflicts being faced in this negotiation between economics and securitisation. Because this text is necessarily limited in its focus I do not have the space to extrapolate this theme here, but scholars such as Cheung (2009), Nie (2006), Keane and Montgomery (2006) and Zhang (2006) further discuss these issues.

  8. Douban is one of the largest online communities in China with about 10 million registered users, as of late 2009.

  9. Extensive research has yet to be done on what affect the socialist history of enforced collectivism has had in terms of new collective and collaborative modes of labour and whether this makes out a significant deviation from ideas of collectivism in European creative sectors. These themes were addressed during our conversation with Chen Hangfeng and Chris Connery, see Kanngieser and Zechner, 2010.

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Kanngieser, A. Creative labour in Shanghai: Questions on politics, composition and ambivalence. Subjectivity 5, 54–74 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2011.25

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