The Transcultural Production of Creative Subjectivity: London Art, Design and Communication Higher Education in Mumbai and Shanghai Cultural Industries

This thesis considers the productive subjectivity of alums of London art and design higher education now active in Mumbai and Shanghai cultural industries, drawing on interviews with 51 practitioners. It proposes a framework emphasising the dialectical roots of Leon Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development in Hegelian dialectics to study creative labour in transnational capitalism. I argue that the production of creative subjectivity emerges from uneven and combined development through learned processes of internalisation and externalisation. Internationally mobile subjects from the southern cities engage in a passage through the constitutive other – the former metropole – to produce a subjectivity whose very autonomy and abstractly cosmopolitan flexibility serves transnational capital.

The research finds that interview subjects utilise discourses of non-contemporaneous world space and learned forms of creativity as the managed development of the potentialities of disjuncture. Participants identify with the project of helping to bring the southern cities into self-contemporaneity through their productive intervention. They thereby engage with the unevenness of world space under the international division of labour in subjective terms as a source of creative potential from difference. Objective factors of unevenness highlighted by participants include differential degrees of commodification and division of labour, skills levels, and predominance of mental over manual labour, but also factors associated with less capitalistically developed means of labour reproduction in the Southern cities as compared to London, such as universities, museums and galleries, and consumer culture such as fashion. These inform subjective discourses of individual and national becoming.

I address the production of world space as the distribution of fragmented subjectivity according to the conflicting needs of capital and labour. Educational migrants to and from the command centres of capital re-internalise the force of fragmentation as productive self-development, mapping individual yearnings to capital’s needs for expansion. I show that creative labour, while harbouring emancipatory potentials, is, under existing conditions, characterised by active alienation: the ongoing extension of the rule of dead over living labour.