The Factory of Individuation: Cultural Labor and Class Composition in the Metropolis

This article addresses the class composition of artistic and cultural labor in the metropolis: practices bringing with them political possibilities and potentials for renewed economic growth, but also the threat of exploitation and precarity. To shed light on the area of knowledge engaging with the lived realities of creative workers and the forms of subjectivation occurring in forms of labor, we bring together existing accounts addressing the politics of cultural work and the findings of our “Metropolitan Factory” research project. The research project, based on an investigation of the conditions and activities of independent cultural producers and drawing from the tradition of workers' inquiry, addresses, among other issues, the spatial organization of the creative labor process, the language used by workers to describe relations between life and work, and various forms of self-expression.