Kill The Inventor! If Capitalism Spurs Innovation, Who Is The Horse?

The saying “capitalism spurs innovation” conjures a sense that capitalism is promoting, accelerating and encouraging creative advance. However, spurs are also a disciplinary device, used to break in horses and make them comply with the will of their riders. Inventor-entrepreneurs are subjected to precisely this sort of “training,” or discipline – what Henri Lefebvre refers to as dressage. This chapter explores how dressage operates through the expectations and formal legal agreements that accompany venture investments. Though it is common to conceptualize entrepreneurs as the creative vanguard of neoliberal capitalism, here we see instead that capital, or the investors operating in its name, are mainly interested in working with “doubly free entrepreneurs” who are willing to renounce direct control over their innovations and instead become employees that are able to be fired as needed. Entrepreneurial creativity represents one small aspect of a broader, intergenerational and inherently collective capacity to create, make, maintain and imagine. Dressage speaks to a more broadly understood enclosure of this creativity, subtly reinforced through the lionization of entrepreneurship as the pinnacle of creative activity. As a result, a wide array of possibilities and potentials are actively disciplined and reduced to the potential to create (green) capital.