Culture, politics and the cultural industries: Reviving a critical agenda

Abstract

It is possible to present a narrative that can trace the genealogy of the study of the cultural industries back to the beginnings of cultural policy studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a period when cultural policy occupied centre stage for reformist governments in (at least) the United Kingdom, Australia, and much of western Europe. Cultural policy studies established itself within the university as a field of teaching and research, and the level of pragmatism it displayed in engaging with policy-makers helped it to secure credibility within government. The manner in which it approached the production of culture reflected its Foucauldian theoretical orientation (Bennett, 1998) in that it was mostly, but not exclusively, interested in the role that government played in producing culture; hence its most important interventions concerned heritage-based cultural institutions such as museums and arts funding bodies as well as media regulation and film policy. In the United Kingdom these interests diversified, eventually leading to, among other things, a strand of research that engaged directly with political economy and thus with the industrial production of culture. The second chapter in our narrative, then, would deal with the emergence of the cultural industries paradigm in the United Kingdom from the late 1990s to the present. While just as interested in issues of policy and regulation as those in cultural policy studies, it had a far greater interest in political economy and what actually counted as the cultural industries in this paradigm was also significantly different. It concentrated its attention upon the expanding media and popular entertainment industries, what David Hesmondhalgh describes as industries that ‘deal primarily with the industrial production and circulation of texts’ (2013: 16), and in recent years it has been particularly concerned with examining the emergence of the digital media industries. If we turn to the third and most recent chapter in our story, we find traces of aspects of each of these preceding models in the development of the concept of the creative industries from the early 2000s (see Flew, 2012). The creative industries model understands the necessity of engaging with policy, it has concentrated upon the commercial and industrial response to digital technologies, and it is determined to find points of alignment between both government and industry but, rather than pursuing a fundamental concern with culture, it frames its interest as participating in a commercial and political agenda of innovation and enterprise (Cunningham, 2013). One observation to make about that narrative would be to note that over the course of those three decades its central characters, the cultural industries, were asked to play significantly different roles. Crudely put, where the central focus of cultural policy studies was upon a broadly defined notion of culture and the politics of its construction, the focus of creative industries was upon a narrowly defined notion of the economy and the instruments of enterprise. I need to stress, however, that this has not been anything like a single or straightforward evolutionary trajectory. Significantly, for my purposes here, while the political and critical character of the original interest in the cultural industries may have been maintained in many locations within the academy and government, in many more locations it has been displaced, or at least compromised, by the successive variations of interest and position that have in effect fragmented the field. Among the casualties of this fragmentation has been what was once central: the critical examination of the cultural, social and political function and potential of the cultural industries. Important, here, are the implications of some shifts in terminology, of categories and therefore of focus, in both the policy domain and in the academic fields concerned with understanding and informing that domain. I am referring, first, to the shift from the ‘cultural’ to the ‘creative’ in the framing of so much of the most recent work on the cultural industries, but also to the manner in which forecasts of the potential of a ‘creative economy’ have been taken up as a policy opportunity that has allowed a narrow conception of the economic to displace cultural or political categories. These shifts, I suggest, have contributed to a trend which, in certain configurations, takes us away from a focus on the cultural industries’ participation in the construction and maintenance of forms of culture and community (those of the locality, the region or the nation), and towards a focus upon investment in the individual - the entrepreneur, the artist or the consumer. The concept of the creative economy has been influential and now constitutes one of the more common aspirations to appear in policy documents produced by contemporary government agencies dealing with the cultural industries - from transnational bodies such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), to national cultural and regulatory bodies, and all the way down to the local council. The creative economy is an attractive proposition to these agencies: rather than having to reluctantly accept the fact that cultural initiatives will cost rather than raise money, for such agencies the creative economy holds out the prospect of serving both cultural and economic objectives simultaneously. By articulating a new rationale for prioritising the economic considerations that have become so fundamental for policy-makers, the complex of formations I am summarising under the term of the creative economy promises to develop cultural industries that are comprised of viable enterprises that do not require subvention or financial assistance. That possibility is made more likely as a result of the post-2000s broadening of the definitions of the cultural industries - moving from the traditional domains of the arts, culture and heritage towards embracing emerging technologies and their applications: multimedia arts, digital design and entertainment products as well as the cohort of online entrepreneurs developing social media platforms, retailing ‘apps’ and so on. These newly expanded boundaries have created fertile ground for the ideas of creative economy pundits such as Richard Florida (2002), informing policy approaches to, for instance, developing ‘creative cities’ (Landry, 2000) through planning projects aimed at seeding clusters of ‘creatives’ as a cultural component within enterprises in urban renewal. This chapter argues that these developments have taken us quite some distance from what might once have been regarded as the key critical arguments about why the cultural industries might matter - socially, politically, culturally and ethically. It is time, I suggest, to respond by insisting that, the creative economy notwithstanding, the cultural industries can do much more for us than merely support small business enterprises run by ‘creatives’, or provide the cultural rationale for certain aspects of urban development projects. The approaches to the study and analysis of the cultural industries that underpinned earlier versions of the field, such as cultural policy studies, can remind us of that potential.