Critical Studies in Media Communication

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Culture Industries in a Postindustrial Age:

Entertainment, Leisure, Creativity, Design

Raúl Rodríguez-Ferrándiz

To cite this article: Raúl Rodríguez-Ferrándiz (2014) Culture Industries in a Postindustrial Age:
Entertainment, Leisure, Creativity, Design, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 31:4, 327-341,
DOI: 10.1080/15295036.2013.840388

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Published online: 10 Oct 2013.

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Critical Studies in Media Communication
Vol. 31, No. 4, October 2014, pp. 327–341

Culture Industries in a Postindustrial Age:

Entertainment, Leisure, Creativity, Design
Raúl Rodríguez-Ferrándiz

This article reviews the evolution of the concept of culture industries, when neither
industry nor culture themselves are today what they were at the time when the term
was coined. It attempts to explain the dilution of the term into more nebulous terms
(“leisure industries,” “entertainment industries” or “creative industries”) and suggests
new challenges for the research on culture industries. What is at stake is no longer an
application of a Fordist production to culture, a one-directional mass communication
and a mediation by experts, but rather: (1) a cultural experience which is no longer
clearly separated from other activities (leisure in general, consumption and even work);
(2) the communicative explosion of all industrial production in a media environment,
where industrialized symbolic products are mixed with culturalized industrial
products; and (3) the empowerment of the recipient, which on one hand ignores the
traditional experts and on the other leads to post-productive (recreational and even
creative) cultural practices.

Keywords: Culture Industries; Leisure Industries; Entertainment Industries; Creative

Industries; Postindustrial Society

Culture Industry: From Stigmatization to Institutionalization

“Culture industry,” a term which is already almost 70 years old and has obtained
academic and institutional sanction, is in need of an epistemological and critical
reassessment that will bring it up to date. This is particularly relevant in the light of
the fact that other, somewhat misplaced labels, such as “creative industries” or
“entertainment industries,” are being used to replace it, in professional or corporate
media, in academic literature and scholar meetings and events. If we want the term to
continue to serve as a challenging concept, we must remind ourselves of its original

Raúl Rodríguez-Ferrándiz is Full Professor at the Department of Communication and Social Psychology, University
of Alicante (Spain). Correspondence to: Raúl Rodríguez-Ferrándiz, Communication and Social Psychology,
University of Alicante, Ctra. de San Vicente s/n, Apdo 99 Alicante 03080, Spain. Email: r.rodriguez@ua.es

ISSN 1529-5036 (print)/ISSN 1479-5809 (online) © 2013 National Communication Association

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2013.840388
328 R. Rodríguez-Ferrándiz
meaning and adapt it to the new conditions in which contemporary culture is
produced, distributed, and consumed. Just like “mass culture,” “culture industry” was
the result of disillusionment and apprehension; both expressions must, at the very
least, have sounded somewhat bizarre, that is if they did not provoke feelings of
stupor or scandal. However, names, and those who impose them have no control
over their destiny.
To begin with, “culture industry” shares an obvious feature with “mass culture.”
Both terms combine a pair of notions which appear to be mutually exclusive. The
“masses” as well as “industry” are concepts which seem hard to reconcile with
culture: cultural excellence suggests creative genius, autonomous and individual
inspiration, rather than planned serial production, division of labor and a search for
economic efficiency or increased market shares. Thus, “culture industry” and “mass
culture” seem to refer to the same phenomenon and are meant to denounce, rather
than conceal, the anomaly of respectively mixing culture with the masses and culture
with industry. The difference lies in the emphasis the former term puts on
production and the latter on reception.
The somber forecasts of the Frankfurt School were weakened during the last quarter
of the 20th century, and a certain degree of revisionism entered critical discourse
(Curran, 1990). If it was true that culture had lost its critical potential and had become
the transmission and lubrication of the social mechanism, by which is meant that it
had assumed an affirmative character, reinforcing and legitimating the strategies of
production (as thought by Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979), this did not necessarily
mean that the consumers of culture uncritically accepted the messages it produced.
Against these strategies of the producers, the recipients could always think of tactics
that may be more hazardous but effective. And thus they advocated minor forms of
subversion: semiological guerrilla activities, misunderstandings, and resistance through
rituals (de Certeau, 1984; Eco, 1986; Fiske, 2001; Hall, 1981; Morley, 1980).
Consumption in general and its most eminent form, the consumption of culture,
constituted an arena for a genuine construction of meaning, or, at the very least, for re-
appropriation for purposes that could not be anticipated, rather than a mere displaying
of the meanings which had been craftily placed there by the producers of culture.
Culture industries has thus become a descriptive rather than an appraising term,1
which is no longer capable of offending either good taste or the spirit of liberalism.
But, since the end of the 20th century, culture industries as a conceptual,
epistemological, and empirical unit has been influenced by tendencies that affect its
industrial nature as much as it does its cultural one. In other words, what do we refer
to with “culture industries” when neither industry nor culture themselves are today
what they were at the time when the term was coined?

Culture Industries in a Postindustrial Society: From Industrialized Culture to

Culturalized Industry
From as early as the late 1920s, Adorno began to give shape to a Fordist conception
of culture production; his work on phonography, jazz, radio transmitted music, and
 Critical Studies in Media Communication 329
cinema is an outline of a culture industry whose fundamental trait is standardization
(Adorno, 1991, 2002; Gendron, 1986). The expression “culture industry” is justified
because it applies to symbolic goods the same dynamics of fabrication, distribution,
and commercialization, the same market principles (investment of capital, mechan-
ical reproduction, division of labor), and the same routines of production
(minimizing costs and maximizing profits by means of standard patterns in the
shape of a framework of invariables and an ample but limited number of
interchangeable parts) as it does to other products of capitalist industry. In order
to preserve a specific difference with regard to the latter, the culture industry,
according to Adorno, employs the strategy of pseudo-individuality. It introduces into
every cultural product a trait, conceived as an optional variation of the standard
product, to be able to justify its claim to novelty and originality. As a result, cultural
consumption is distinguished by a voracity for the new and by a demand for
distinction which is more pronounced than in other sectors of consumption
(Adorno, 1990 [1941], p. 24).
Cultural products were produced, disseminated, distributed, and commercialized
in the same way as those of any other industry of goods and services, but they
seemed to remain impregnable bastions of individuality; the musician, the novelist or
the scriptwriter battled to create a personal work of art, safe from the assaults of
standardization (Adorno, 1990, p. 306). For Adorno, that creative individuality is
so false and artificial that it permanently needs to put itself on parade. Hence
the emphasis that advertisements of newly released cultural products place on the
“novel,” the “different,” the “unheard-of” and also on the “original” and the
“genuine” of the author The pseudo-individuality of the author had its corollary in
that of the recipients; with cultural consumer choice, they also had aspirations of
committing a personal and non-transferable act, directly partaking of the personality
that is proper to the artist. As a consequence, recipients, be they listeners, spectators,
or readers, would close their eyes to all the mediating agencies that insert themselves
between these recipients and the object of veneration, the artist. To give only some
examples: the cultural-industrial tycoon who contracts the author (editor, producer),
the technical professions which put the finishing touches on the work (instrumen-
talists, arrangers, sound, or lighting technicians, designers, composers of soundtracks,
or compilers of the credit titles, etc.) and all those who advertise, distribute, and
exhibit or sell the final copy (from the designers of the book, the album or the DVD
cover, to the bookseller or the assistant in a record or video shop, without forgetting
the author’s or artist’s agent and the agencies of advertising and public relations
responsible for the whole promotional strategy, see, for example, Hirsch, 1972;
Peterson, 1976).
To be precise, however, this pseudo-individuality of the producer, the product, and
the client is what all the industry of goods and services does, and not exclusively the
culture industries. It is what marketing calls “product differentiation,” or “product
development,” or even “research and development” (R&D). To a certain degree the
culture industries have taught the other branches of industry to pseudo-individualize
themselves to gain in competitiveness, differentiation, and in surcharge for the value
330 R. Rodríguez-Ferrándiz
that has been added to the product. Culture may well have become industrialized, but
it is no less true that in the same process, industry has “culturalized” itself.
We are witnessing a double operation consisting of a thingification of media and a
mediation of things, as Lash and Lury call it (2007, pp. 7–12; 85–108), unceremo-
niously undergone by objects formerly held to be either cultural or utilitarian.
Cultural objects descend halfway from the superstructure down towards the base,
and the utilitarian ones move in the opposite direction by the same amount, where
they all meet in a media environment. On the one hand, symbolic media products
such as Toy Story, Wallace & Gromit, or Trainspotting become reified, popping out of
the screen and transforming themselves into things, objects, or places. They are
merchandized in the form of games, toys, T-shirts, pajamas, slippers, posters,
collectable chromes, fairground rides (Toy Story, Wallace & Gromit), and districts
and streets in Edinburgh where the film Trainspotting was shot. In their turn, global
brands such as Nike and Swatch, which have physically real products in the world
(sports clothing, watches), are built and presented by advertisers not only invested
with attributes and qualities, but also as the main characters of stories and narratives.
We are surrounded by merchandizing (as a reification of symbols and imagery) and
brand storytelling (as a symbolization of commodities as living, changing and
evolving entities), along with the recent “third-way” strategy of “branded entertain-
ment,” “branded content” or “advertainment” (Lehu, 2007).
Yet it is necessary to take a further step. This construction process of the
significance of the product (beyond its mere utility) is not reducible to a simple
stratagem of advertising or promotion in the final stages of production, once it is out
of the assembly line and inside the arena of social interaction. Long before that, from
planning, designing, fabrication, packaging, and all the way down to the distribution
and display at the point of purchase, including the act of sale itself, does it not appear
evident that all industrial production has acquired a dimension which is incontest-
ably communicative? This communicative function has been expanding externally
(the market of potential buyers, society in general with which contracts of corporate
responsibility are made), as well as internally (the workers of the company, the
shareholders). But at the same time the product itself has become communicative.
This means that industry, regardless of its activity, should anticipate and furnish a
communicable product. They thus, in a way, replicate what the culture industries do
naturally, since their product already constitutes communication. As a consequence,
the very design of a product is exactly what its etymology suggests: A de-sign, an
indication or an evocation of a communicative operation. Sense and destiny are
mixed in “design.” Commodities are designed to have a symbolic appeal as part of
their own selling operation: an object which happens to circulate is converted into
one which is designed to do so, and so is materially stamped with that character
(Wernick, 1991, pp. 189–190). In the case of cultural commodities, those goods
where what is consumed is the signifying material they contain, they were, even in
the Fordist era, “design intensive” and “innovation intensive,” to a much greater
extent than other industries. They were, in reality, post-Fordists avant la lettre (Lash
& Urry, 1994, p. 123).
 Critical Studies in Media Communication 331
At the very heart of paid labor the communicative skills acquire a special value.
Work, rather than the quiet activity it used to be—“Silence, work in progress!”—has
become a cooperative process, and what it is valued is ductility, informality, and
reflexes in the face of the unforeseen: communicative “virtuosity,” in short (Virno,
2004, pp. 56–62). Thus the production of communication and culture has become
the essential industry within the actual “industry of the means of production.” This
means that the culture industries today are equivalent to the machine tool factories
for other factories in the Fordist era, with the difference that they are no longer
heavy industry, but rather industries which are extraordinarily light and versatile.
The culture industries create, experiment with, and modernize the cultural and
communicative mechanisms which are later destined to function as means of
production, even in the most traditional sectors of the contemporary economy.
The fabrication of the product or service, which is initiated with its conception and
design long before work on the corresponding raw material begins, does not end
with the finished product seeing the light of day and placing it in the hands of the
consumer. The production, which is now symbolic, proceeds relentlessly, as this
product or service emits signification, or rather as it is compelled to signify for its
users and for all those who participate in its use (actually, or at a distance, directly or
indirectly, live or through the media). The production machine (of signification)
remains in motion after the production machines of objects have stopped, as the
most perspicacious investigations on consumption have shown (Miller, 1987, 1995;
Storey, 1999), and this production of symbols is negotiated in a manner which is
independent, dynamic, and sometimes contrary to the intention of design and
advertising (de Certeau, 1984; Fiske, 2001; Rodríguez-Ferrándiz, 2012).
The culture industries, which may have agonizingly applied to themselves the
Fordist production routines imported from other industrial sectors, now, however,
lead the post-Fordist revolution in other areas of production and consumption
(Lacroix & Tremblay, 1997, p. 117). But at what price?

From Contemplation to Participation: Leisure and Entertainment Industries

Only half a century ago, a clear distinction was still being drawn between mass
culture on the one hand and mass entertainment or mass leisure on the other. Clear
evidence of this is the two anthologies that bear precisely these titles, which were
edited by the same publishing house in the span of one year and which contained
important contributions in both cases (Rosenberg & White, 1957; Larrabee &
Meyersohn, 1958). Mass literature, strip cartoons, cinema, radio, and television, as
well as popular music and advertising were salient topics in Mass culture (1957).
Mass leisure (1958) focused on people at play or at leisure, not on those engaged in
self-education, even though all these activities could be indulged in during times of
recreation. The practices which were analyzed were sports, hobbies, holidays,
socializing, and social life away from home (restaurants, dance halls, bars, pubs).
This means that a distinction is made between: (1) free time devoted to the
consumption of cultural products or services, understood as texts produced by
332 R. Rodríguez-Ferrándiz
specially qualified creative artists (novelists, musicians, film-makers) and which
tended to inspire a reflective attitude; and (2) free time devoted to the enjoyment of
essentially active and participatory occupations of recreation in which we ourselves
were the indispensable performers (players, competitors, participants of an experi-
ence that was not only taking place in front of us and within us but as a result of us).
The academic reputation of the authors of the compiled texts is beyond dispute.
The first anthology included contributions of philosophers, social scientists, and
critics including Ortega, Greenberg, Kracauer, Adorno, MacDonald, Löwenthal,
Riesman, McLuhan, and Lazarsfeld. The scholars contributing to the second
anthology included anthropologists such as Huizinga and Mead, psychologists like
Piaget, philosophers such as Russell, political scientists like Lafargue, and sociologists
as Lynes, Katz, and (again) Riesman.
However, with the opening of this century, the borders between culture and leisure
have begun to fray and the culture industries start being attracted and sucked in by
the vicinity of other industries that are colonizing free time. “Entertainment
industry” (Caves, 2006; Vogel, 2004) or the notion of “leisure industry” (Roberts,
2004) represent categories that bracket together the dramatic arts, popular fiction,
cinema, radio, television, and videogames, with the practicing of sports, betting,
casinos, theme parks and tourism, toys and adult games, even with shopping, going
to restaurants and the consumption of alcohol (Roberts, 2004, pp. 61–198; Vogel,
2004, pp. 355–530).
In an uncompromisingly critical and even caustic manner, Adorno previously
denounced the connivance of culture and entertainment within the culture industry.
For him “just for fun” was the characteristic slogan of that industry. In his essays
from the late 30s, written in the English language to which he resorted in his
British and later American exile, the terms “entertainment,” “pleasure,” “enjoyment,”
“amusement,” “sensuality,” “charm,” “delight,” “gaiety,” “gallant,” the formulas
“culinary moment,” “sensory stimulation,” “gay façade,” “coloristic dimensions,”
and other expressions of a similar type, are tainted by the connotation of the
reprehensible, the degenerate or the depraved, in such a way that “the cultural goods”
are converted into “evils,” as a result of this flaccidity of taste and the anxiety for the
delectable and the gratifying of “cheap amusement” (Adorno, 1990, 1991, 2002).
In the chapter the Dialectic of enlightenment dedicated to the culture industry we
read: “Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work” (Adorno &
Horkheimer, 1979, p. 137), which appears to make matters worse still. Those who
think they have managed to escape from the rationalized and optimized chore of the
day by seeking refuge in the entertainment that is offered by the mass media of
communication, are yet another part of the industrial logic, as this amusement is
equally mechanized, programmed, and mass-produced. It is experienced as a copy, a
reproduction of the same work process that takes place in the factory or in the office.
In fact, the consumer of culture is exclusively a consumer of copies: films,
photographic images, radio broadcasts, and recordings of music. And thus, “the
ostensible content is merely a faded foreground; what sinks in is the automatic
succession of standardised operations” (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1979).
 Critical Studies in Media Communication 333
Even if I disagree with the radicalism of Adorno’s critique, the author presents two
hypotheses with regards to the cultural industry that I feel have been proved beyond
all reasonable doubt: (1) that there has been a fusion of culture and entertainment,
made possible by the ludic trivialization of culture and the forced spiritualization of
entertainment; and (2) the submission of this culture-entertainment to labor when it
is supposed to be the opposite. These impressions on the avatar of culture and leisure
in the 1940s have greater value because in this epoch they were more difficult to
detect; looking at them today, they seem nothing less than visionary.
Let us analyze these two realities in our current times. The cultural experience no
longer interrupts the daily routine—including that of leisure time—with an especially
intense parenthesis. Culture is rather something that may take place—without any
overt disruptions or special characteristics—in time of leisure, over a very prolonged
period and with its internal borders blurred. Accordingly, it is the “participatory”
pastimes I considered above, which get the better of the merely “contemplative,” and
which oblige the cultural product to play the game, to propose a game, and to
become a game. Digitalization and telematics, which convert the “classical” cultural
product (books, records, films) into a digital file which is accessible online, enable us
to consume it on a computer, where the reading, listening or viewing converges not
only over the same device, but with other forms of recreation (videogames, pastimes,
games of chance, sports betting lotteries, chats). Media convergence allows cultural
products to be conceived as just one more entertainment opportunity among many
others, and not necessarily as part of an intellectually or aesthetically superior range.
As leisure and entertainment activities, even those that are less refined or demanding,
cultural experiences offer an absolutely indiscriminate enjoyment, one that is ever-
present, portable, demystified, independent of time, place, rituals, and special or
specialized practitioners. In effect, the user develops an active, not only contemplative
role. Intervention is not just permitted: it is required, even to the extent of finishing
the product to their liking. The user must be capable of intervening in, manipulating
and (provisionally) finishing the product. It is therefore not a matter of merely
acquiring the product, rather, it is a question of doing something with it: from a
cultural experience to a (postcultural?) experiment.
Here are some examples that I discuss in greater detail elsewhere (Rodríguez-
Ferrándiz, 2012). Music fans not only play the tracks of an acquired product as often
as they like, they can also select their favorite songs, rename and recompile them at
will, producing a new, if unedited, set of tracks, or even edit or sample them, post-
producing the product to create personalized listening on a CD or an MP3 player’s
playlist. This practice, which became known in the industry as “sampling” in the
1950s (with sampler albums being compilations of various artists from the same
label) is now a prerogative of the listener. But the concept went from being an
anthology of tracks to being the creation of a new tune through mixing existing
tracks, something which is also within reach of the user. Two or three tunes would be
mixed to produce a musical mash-up, a hitherto-unheard mix of previously released
and recognizable tunes.2 Video clips are another format much favored by the fans of
singers and groups, as well as (on the crossover) by lovers of audiovisual creation.
334 R. Rodríguez-Ferrándiz
There are, of course, “official” clips, but there are also anime music videos (AMV),
an entire category of alternative clips, and amateur clips, as well as a universe of
home-produced clips which employ images from highly diverse sources set to music,
ranging from tributes to the most outrageous parodies.
Painting enthusiasts can download an image from the internet, or scan a printed
copy, modify, rename or label it at will, thereby appropriating it (without necessarily
avoiding any reference to the “original”). Photo enthusiasts act similarly, using
photographs taken by others or from an image bank and applying computer graphics
to these materials. The humoristic dimension of these collage techniques is self-
conscious, as if the creators want to ensure that the process of “cut and paste”
underlying that the joke remains evident. Interactive humor, funny photos,
maniphotos, phanimation, celebrity soundboards, and PowerPoint humor describe
some of these techniques (Shifman, 2007).
Movie-buffs and home moviemakers not only play movies and make home videos,
they also edit, add sound, dub, insert subtitles or signs, visual or sound effects, and
design their own trailers. It is also popular to compile anthologies of favorite scenes,
organized by director, actor, genre, or subject.3 A host of ad hoc terms is already in
circulation to describe all this audiovisual productivity on the part of the user:
synchros, i.e. split screens with windows showing simultaneous actions viewed at
different points in time; recaps, i.e. summaries of a TV season, for example using a
selection of dramatic highlights, often with a voiceover or explanatory subtitles to
link the scenes together.4 unofficial trailers; alternative endings; interstitial stories
which “fill in” the gaps of another product; spoilers, or unauthorized previews of an
essential element of the plot or its denouement.5 false trailers for non-existent films,
or trailers in which the sound, logos, or montage paradoxically change the genre of a
well-known film.6
Readers of e-books, or of digitalized literary texts in general, show a tendency
toward underlining, annotating, and criticizing these texts. This is obviously nothing
new: readers have been doing so since the dawn of writing. What characterizes the
current time is the obsession with sharing these selected quotes, impressions,
comments, and comparisons with other earlier or later texts by adding to the
original, thus extending and diffusing them. The task of Google Books to digitize all
the books in the world is complemented by the joint, collective, but no less titanic
task, of giving these books their commentary, their replica, their gloss. First, bloggers
(more selective) and then social networkers (more frequent and usual), the apex of
this electronic Babel, combine the aforementioned multimedia skills and multiply
circulation.
To sum up, we are dealing with telematic activity and interactions between
individuals and groups that do not simply feed off a product, but moreover, off a
productivity that is in a process of continuous construction and acquires a precarious
stability at the moment in which it is accessed, only to be modified the next time, by
our hand or by that of another.
With regards to the second hypothesis—the submission of this culture-entertain-
ment to labor, when it is supposed to be the opposite—it is possible to contemplate
 Critical Studies in Media Communication 335
some analogous considerations. The same computer that permits this activity
constitutes an instrument of work for millions of people, who use it at their work
place or at home (without preventing them from pursuing, to a certain degree, all the
other activities at the same time by multitasking). Moreover, the same computer
constitutes the implement of the creators of culture (either literary, musical, graphic,
cinematographic, videografic, or infographic) in a task that is getting less and less
individualistic, self-concentrated, personal, and confidential, and ever more collab-
orative, interactive, and co-produced. It is ever less dependent on the judgment of
experts, of qualified peers, ever less sanctioned by associations, academies, profes-
sional jargon, producers, publishers, record makers, and ever more subject to the
universal and instantaneous verdict by telematics, to commentaries, to annotation, to
limitless reprocessing (imitation, homage, parody, caricature, plagiarism). The work
of the creator is replicated by the recreational “work” of its receiver–recreator, a work
which in turn is incorporated into the product and thrown back into the hurly-burly
of the net: not a product but a never-ceasing production; not a finished job and a
reflective pastime, but an interconnected, reprocessed, and unsteady work–leisure
activity.
In consequence, the standardized operations which, according to Adorno, puts
cultural entertainment and Fordist production on an equal footing—even though
they might pertain to different times and spaces—are now being carried out in the
same space and time, with the same supports and implements, but with a
progressively less fixed and inert standardization which is imposed from outside
and with an ever more open, dynamic, and autonomous modularity. Modernity has
brought about an industrialization, rationalization, and commercialization of
recreation, but it is also true that work today is seen in an informal and even playful
light. Both activities are channeled through the same teaming avenue where we find a
helter-skelter of new technologies, involved conviviality, and experimentation,
mixing homo ludens and homo laborans.
Nevertheless, a further observation should be made. The agency of media
consumers as amateur producers, which theorists have resolved through the use of
the labels “prosumers” (Toffler, 1980), “produsers” (Bruns, 2008), “post-production”
(Bourriaud, 2005), “remixability” (Manovich, 2005) and “mass self-communication”
(Castells, 2009), must be nuanced and refined, as they omit a third mediating term
that is present in the old and new media: the “advertiser.” Empowered users are not
only content or tool providers, but also (often unknowingly) data providers that
supply valuable information to the industrial cultures, generating metadata on the
social behavior of a profitable consumer segment. In addition, it is commonplace for
the culture industries to parasitically extract value from fan labor: fans are seen as
workers in a social media factory which draws value from user-generated content and
vernacular cultural production (Bratich, 2011). A focus on the issue of “convergence
culture” or “transmedia” (Jenkins, 2006) emphasizes a democratized creativity of
diffuse and jointly owned authorship and even a renewed political activism and
citizenship, although it perhaps underestimates the many other types of “converging”
(Hay & Couldry, 2011).
336 R. Rodríguez-Ferrándiz
From Recreation to Creation: Creative Industries
In parallel with the establishment of the terms “leisure industries” or “entertainment
industries,” we are also witnessing the spread of the expression “creative industries.”
At this point we encounter an even bolder twist in the passage from recreational
activity to the creative act. This creativity, however, is neither the exclusive domain of
the individual author, nor is it the sole preserve of the recipient (in its quality of
game, experimentation, procedure, or co-production), but, beyond all this, inculcates
the very industry that mediates between these two sides.
There are precedents for considering the relationship that exists between the
creative work of the creator of culture (as well as of the sensitive recipient) and the
also “creative” work of industry, in the spheres of fabrication, packaging, distribution,
and advertising, as constituting some kind of continuity, rather than one of
opposition. The terms “innovation filters” (Hirsch, 1972), “collaborative art worlds”
(Becker, 1984), “cultural gatekeepers” (Bourdieu, 1993, 1996) and “promotional
culture” (Wernick, 1991) have been coined.
A growing number of scholars are using the expression “creative industry” with a
variety of connotations (Bilton, 2007; Blythe, 2001; Caves, 2000; Negus, 2006; Negus
& Pickering, 2004; O’Connor, 2007). The conventions, however, seem to be
established by international governance institutions (i.e. UNESCO, UNCTAD,
OECD, EU), rather than by the academic world (Braun & Lavanga, 2007;
Hesmondhalgh, 2007a, pp. 142–149, 2007b). In fact, the term “creative industries”
originated in Australia at the beginning of the 1990s and has been institutionally
recognized in the United Kingdom, where it has been current since 1998 as an
aggregate denomination of the government’s Department of Culture, Media and
Sport. According to the latter, the creative industries include “those activities which
have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential
for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual
property,” and include “advertising, architecture, the art and antiques market, crafts,
design, designer fashion, film, interactive leisure software, music, the performing arts,
publishing, software, and television and radio” (Blythe, 2001, pp. 145–146; Jeffcutt &
Pratt, 2002, p. 227).
While in Great Britain they have been talking about “creative industries,” the
European Commission has recently adopted a double denomination, “culture and
creative industries.” This double term encompasses essentially the same as the single
term used in the UK, establishing, however, distinctions which the European Union
itself had upheld in other reports, such as The economy culture in Europe (KEA,
2006) and The impact of culture on creativity (KEA, 2009), and featuring concentric
circles rather than juxtaposed sectors. In April 2010 the Green Paper Unlocking the
full potential of Europe’s cultural and creative industries was presented in Barcelona,
coinciding with the Spanish presidency of the EU. In it we read that since the year
2000 the cultural sector in the EU has encompassed, in statistical terms, eight basic
activities (artistic and monumental heritage, archives, libraries, books and press,
visual arts, architecture, performing arts, and audio and audiovisual media/
 Critical Studies in Media Communication 337
multimedia), and six functions (preservation, creation, production, dissemination,
trade/sales, and education). However, “in this Green Paper, we adopt a rather broad
approach based on the following working definitions”, which give a picture of a
“radiation process,” that is, “a model of the culture industries centered around the
locus of origin of creative ideas, and radiating outwards as those ideas become
combined with more and more other inputs to produce a wider and wider range of
products” (Economic Union [EU], 2010).
The concept of creative industries not only encompasses the cultural products of
mass reproduction, but also the arts field and the performing arts (frequently
excluded from studies of culture industries for being non-reproducible by nature and,
for that reason, not industrial). It also includes those industries which use culture as
an input and have a cultural dimension, although their outputs are mainly functional
(architecture and design), as well as subsectors such as graphic design, fashion design
or advertising.
This ambivalence in production in the post-industrial era produces perplexities
which have caught the attention of cultural critics: we have passed from the anguish
and disappointment Adorno felt on seeing the creative act of the artist swallowed up
by the logic of industry, to qualifying the entire industry as “creative,” to place
creativity itself at the very heart of this industry. It seems evident that broadening the
term brings about a lessening in intensity: the culture industries would be the core of
this creative economics of imprecise and elastic boundaries. Strong criticism has been
leveled against this lack of precision of the term “creative,” which mixes together
contents with technological devices and networks, software with hardware, symbolic
production with material production, the utilitarian with the thinly disguised desire
to erase the specificity of culture within the global market, to do away with cultural
exceptions to this extremely sensitive production, or, on the contrary, to extend
protection to other activities which are not a public service (Galloway & Dunlop,
2007; Garnham, 2005; Schlesinger, 2007).
What is certain, however, is that the distinction between cultural products which
constitute an end in themselves, and products which are more loosely labeled as
“creative,” that is products with a cultural content which nonetheless fulfill a
utilitarian purpose, is fragile in the extreme. It is paradoxical in a sense that the term
“culture industry,” which was coined as a caricature of genuine culture, has now
become a term under threat, the last bastion of culture, because other, more nebulous
terms are being used to supplant it: creativity, innovation, contents, copyright,
experience, and entertainment are labels which dissipate the essence of a culture in
need of protection. Is it not possible, however, to remain vigilant with regard to the
cultural dimensions of patrimony, memory, identity, and symbolization, and
recognize at the same time that these dimensions have pervaded other areas of
human production and that this contagion is not in itself detrimental?
In the post-industrial period the borders between material and immaterial or
symbolic production seem to become erased, not only because culture is always in
need of material support, even in the digital age (support which has been the object
of constantly changing fetishism: from the codex to the iPad, from the LP to the
338 R. Rodríguez-Ferrándiz
iPod), but also because, in a market which seeks differentiation, material, including
its unequivocally functional forms, is not immune to the seductiveness of culture,
communication and symbolic values.
Thus, cultural products turned into consumable commodities have a reverse
(compensatory?) side in ordinary merchandize, “culturalized” by design, advertising
and consumption. Consumption is already not only a question of expense and
extinction but also of co-production, bricolage, and recreation. Objects of use acquire
affective dimensions, social meanings that last longer than the physical extinction of
the object itself, as is supposed to happen with symbolic creations. Furthermore,
cultural products lend themselves to a practice, a co-productive, creative intervention
and not only to a static, sometimes ecstatic, contemplation. All this points to a media
environment in which symbolic and utilitarian products both occupy the same space
and time in our lives and share the same necessity of being promoted, the same
professional agents who execute this promotion and the same channels that deliver it.
The advertising of cultural products and services, as well as that of products and
services of any type, turn everything into communication and emphasize the need to
create/produce them with this communication in view.

Conclusion
The culture industries have become the Industries of the Means of Production in
post-Fordist society, at the price, however, of losing a certain functional cultural
specificity (a “negative” occurrence: culture being that which is supposed to function
without any ulterior motive). This unspecific or nebulous character of the “cultural”
leads to its dissolution in a magma in which culture industries coexist in close
synergy with the leisure and entertainment industries, on the one hand, and with
creative industries, on the other. All industrial production, to some extent, aspires to
play a part in this cultural and communicative creativity. Not only have industry and
commercialization taken possession of culture, the opposite is true as well: culture
too has established itself in the process of production, consumption, as well as in the
promotional go-between that mediates between the two sides and blends them
together. At the same time as this creates very stimulating dilemmas within the fields
of research, theory and cultural criticism, doubtlessly constitutes a challenge. The
effect of this challenge is already apparent with regard to: (1) the protection of the
rights concerning intellectual property of the culture and creativity in circulation; (2)
the disintermediation which obviates the traditional (Fordist?) mediators; and (3) the
growing remediation by emerging (post-Fordist?) agents who, in an unprecedented
manner, negotiate the visibility, notoriety and expiry date of messages and products.

Notes
[1] It thus appeared that ‘culture industry’ had finally ceased to conjure up ideas of threatening
conspiracies of power and money which were designed to perpetuate the subordinate
position of the lower classes. Evidence of this could be seen in the fact that the term was
 Critical Studies in Media Communication 339
most commonly used in the plural, with ‘cultural industries’ (Hirsch, 1972; Lacroix &
Tremblay, 1997; Jeffcut & Pratt, 2002; Negus, 2006; Hesmondhalgh, 2007a) naturally
inspiring less fear than the deadly and invincible Culture Industry of the Frankfurt School.
[2] Riders on the Storm by The Doors and Billy Jean by Michael Jackson are mashed up here, in
Billy Jean on the Storm: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = BMLFrwK7EYA
[3] Selected fragments of the entire film catalog of Quentin Tarantino: http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v = 6bdovgjn7BY&feature = related See also The murder scenes, one after the other, in
The Sopranos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = JhFeZZflUj4
[4] Such as the 6th season of Lost: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = AOHVuJC1o1Y See also
this recap of The Sopranos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = AsgRwxx7au0
[5] Like this from the Fine Brothers: “100 Movie Spoilers in 5 Minutes.” Pared-down economic
resources employed with a fine irony: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = hN5avIvylDw
[6] Kubrick’s The Shining as a wonderful family movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v =
sfout_rgPSA

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