The Cultural Economy Moment

The Cultural Economy Moment?

Professor Terry Flew, Media and Communications,Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of TechnologyKeynote Presentation to

Media Technologies,Community and Everyday Life

, symposium hosted bythe Centre for Everyday Life, Murdoch University,Perth, WA, 2 September 2009

My presentation today will focus upon the rise of the term “culturaleconomy” in the 2000s, and some matters arising about therelationship between both “culture” and “economy” as fields of research and study, and cultural studies and economics as academicdisciplines that seek to understand and intervene in these fields. WhenI refer here to cultural studies, I am not seeking to engage in the longprocess of defining what cultural studies is (or is not), nor am I seekingto sharply differentiate cultural studies from media studies orcommunication studies. Rather, taking a broad definition of the field, Iwill argue that it has been constituted at least in part by an oppositionto how it understands economics as a discipline to be constituted. Thisis seen most clearly in the current context in the way in which “neo-liberalism” is invoked as a term to signify what thinking in terms of economic discourse entails, as well as a critique of its deleteriouseffects when applied to the field of public policy. One of the points Iwant to make is that economics as a discipline is in fact far moreporous and pluralist than this one-dimensional interpretation of itwould suggest, and this emerges in interesting ways when there isconsideration of those parts of economics as a discipline that may bearupon an understanding of culture. In keeping with the theme of today’ssymposium, I will draw upon examples relating to digital mediatechnologies and their everyday uses by people and communitieswhere possible.

The Rise of Cultural Economy: Intellectual Precursors

Although the term “cultural economy” dies not gain widespreadcurrency until the 2000s, there is considerable work undertaken sincethe 1970s that invokes a relationship between culture and economy.Herbert Schiller’s pioneering

critique of international communications

posited a relationship – which Schiller’s work adhered to over a 30 yearperiod – between the rise of the media entertainment and information-based industries (what he termed the Entertainment-Communication-Information (ECI) Complex) to the centre of the United States economy,and the extension of global media and communication industries,systems and ideologies as an instrument of cultural domination onnon-Western societies and cultures. While the resulting “culturalimperialism” thesis has been widely critiqued, it retains considerableinfluence worldwide as seen, for example, in the statement of theWorld Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization in 2004:“The fear is that constant exposure to the images of Western lifestylesand role models could lead to tensions which would be both culturallyand socially divisive” (World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization, 2004: para. 222). There is also the small sub-branch of economic known as

culturaleconomics

. Cultural economics has operated to some extent at themargins of economic theory, largely unable to challenge the utilitarianassumptions of mainstream neo-classical economics nor able to buildbridges to the arts and humanities, so it has frequently operated as anapplied sub-discipline concerned with assessing the impact of publicsubsidy to the arts and cultural activities. It is interesting to considerhow it seeks to clarify what distinguishes the cultural domain fromother areas in terms of its goods and services, its criteria of value, andits delineation of industries and markets. In his overview of this filed, Throsby (2000: 4) proposes a definition of cultural activities as beingthose:

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involving some form of creativity in their production;

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concerned with the generation and communication of symbolic meaning; and

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whose output embodies, at least potentially, some form of intellectual property.2

One notable feature of the cultural economics literature is that it is farless anxious bout whether the resulting industries are labeled culturalor creative industries than is the case in cultural studies and relatedfields. This is because industry analysis is, from the point of view of economics, is ‘simply a convenient box of tools for representing andanalyzing the way in which the processes of production, consumptionand exchange occur for given commodities’ (Throsby, 2000: 111). Atthe same time, in his recent overview of the variety of competingmodels of what the cultural or creative industries are, Throsby hasobserved that one consequence of talking up the economicsignificance of cultural or creative industries has been to shift culturalpolicy thinking so that it is ‘rescued from its primordial past andcatapulted to the forefront of the modern forward-looking policyagenda, an essential component in any respectable economic policy-maker’s development strategy’. This is because ‘the arts can [now] beseen as part of a wider and more dynamic sphere of economic activity,with links through to the information and knowledge economies,fostering creativity, embracing new technologies and feedinginnovation’ (Throsby, 2008: 229).A third and less obvious inspiration for cultural economy discourse waspostmodernism, particularly as it was developed in the early work of Jean Baudrillard (Poster, 1994). Baudrillard argued that a feature of contemporary capitalism was that the distinction between use-valueand exchange value that Marx saw as defining the nature of thecommodity form was less and less relevant to consumer society whereboth were subsumed under the more general category of

sign-value

.Rather than moralizing against the inauthentic nature of, say,entertainment at a theme park as a poor substitute for “real” culture orentertainment, Baudrillard instead proposed the “negative strategy” of celebrating the theme park as a simulacrum of the real, or the hyper-real of postmodern culture. While the impulse to link Baudrillard topolitical economy was one that in practice not many followed, anotable series of contributions that draw upon Baudrillard’s insighthave been made by Scott Lash and John Urry (Lash and Urry, 1989;Lash and Urry, 1994; see also Lash, 2004). For Lash and Urry,Baudrillard’swork hints at a series of developments - the semiotisationof everyday life, reflexive accumulation, niche consumption leadingflexible production – whereby it is not the case that culture is beingincreasingly industrialized, but rather that the whole economy is beingincreasingly culturalized:

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