The Projective City
The projective city is the seventh order of worth, added by Boltanski and Chiapello to the original six in The New Spirit of Capitalism. It names the value system that governs contemporary work and increasingly contemporary life: the valued person is the one who connects, who builds networks, who moves fluidly between projects, who demonstrates adaptability and mobility as core virtues. Worth is measured not by stable expertise or institutional loyalty but by the capacity to initiate and sustain productive connections across organizational boundaries. AI tools appear, at first glance, to enhance the capacities the projective city values — and this appearance is precisely the mechanism by which the projective city absorbs AI while intensifying the precarity that was already its defining feature.
In the AI Story
The projective city emerged historically from the metabolization of the artistic critique. The 1960s demand for authenticity, creativity, and liberation from bureaucratic stifling was answered not by granting those demands in their original form but by reorganizing work around projects. The project-based firm promises what the hierarchical corporation denied: variety, autonomy, meaningful engagement. It delivers these promises in attenuated form while eliminating what the corporation provided: stability, predictability, the capacity to plan a life.
In the projective city, the unvalued person is the one who stays put. Long tenure, deep expertise in a single domain, loyalty to a single organization — all were markers of worth in the industrial order and have become markers of obsolescence in the projective one. The pressure to move, to connect, to reinvent is relentless, and the psychic cost of maintaining projective fluency is rarely counted in the economic analysis.
AI appears to supercharge the projective city's values. The AI-augmented worker can network faster, connect to more information sources, move between domains with less friction, initiate more projects. But the intensification of projective demands produces a specific pathology: the worker whose worth depends on continuous connection cannot disengage without sacrificing her standing, and the AI tool — always available, always responsive — makes disengagement progressively harder.
The deeper diagnosis is that AI does not create the projective city. It intensifies a structure that was already in place, and whose costs were already visible in the epidemic rates of burnout, disconnection, and meaning-loss among knowledge workers. The question is not whether AI will transform work but whether the projective city's tests of worth will be renegotiated or whether they will be driven, by AI's relentless intensification, to a breaking point.
Origin
The concept was introduced in The New Spirit of Capitalism after Boltanski and Chiapello found that the six original orders of worth from On Justification could not adequately describe the value system emerging in 1990s management literature. The projective order was the name they gave to the new grammar of justification that had absorbed the artistic critique.
Key Ideas
Connection as worth. The valued person in the projective city is the connector, the networker, the project mover.
Mobility as virtue. Movement across organizations, domains, and roles is treated as evidence of worth rather than instability.
Absorbed critique. The projective city emerged from capitalism's metabolization of the 1960s artistic critique.
AI as intensifier, not creator. AI does not invent the projective city's demands; it makes them more total and more unavoidable.
Hidden precarity. The mobility that the projective city celebrates is the sociological form of job insecurity.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (Verso, 2005)
- Luc Boltanski, 'The Present Left and the Longing for Revolution' (2014)
- Mauro Basaure, 'An Interview with Luc Boltanski' (European Journal of Social Theory, 2011)