Why do cultural industries matter? I’ll suggest two main reasons. First, they matter because they provide contexts for human beings to discover, disclose and distribute their creativity– in all its diversity and complexity of social and cultural meanings.
In this way, cultural industries help make possible the examination of life. Second, they matter because they provide a means of economising, for generating and dis-tributing resources– particularly for those who have a direct interest in processes of production, distribution and consumption. The cultural industries therefore concern us doubly– culturally and economically. Yet this duality begs a further question, one this chapter seeks specifically to address; namely, how should we appropriately value the cultural industries?
To value is to identify the worth of something, its standing or quality in a world of others. In respect of the cultural industries, we are presented with some obvious difficulties in establishing value or worth. For one, it is not immediately apparent what we ought to be evaluating – cultural or economic practices, or something of both? Neither is it obvious what scheme of evaluation we might best adopt – a monetary or aesthetic scheme? Or a measure attuned to ‘cultural value’, providing such a value can adequately be defined? And even if we conceive an effective means of evaluating, we might reasonably ask how extensive or applicable are its measures, across different times and territories? Clearly the problems of establishing value are legion – but few have been discouraged from tackling them. As the cultural industries have come to prominence, so the number of ways and means of evaluating them has proliferated in and between industry, government and academia. There is little doubt that cultural industries have been widely accounted for, appraised and assessed– their worldly worth scrutinised (e.g. DCMS, 2008; Throsby, 2010; UNESCO, 2013; Work Foundation, 2007).
In what follows I wish to outline some problems of value using the framing example of the United Kingdom and its particular efforts to (re)value the cultural industries as the‘creative industries’. In doing so the first aim is to stress the diffi-culties involved in valuing and to draw attention to the stakes involved in making an evaluation. It will then be argued that at the heart of valuing the cultural industries
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lies an intractable difficulty; a problem of incommensurability that precludes settlement on a singular measure of value, whether cultural or economic. Yet, while much energy has been expended in attempting to efface this problem, I will argue that it is a difficulty that has its own value, one that is vital to recognise and sustain, since the consequences of its resolution or disappearance would prevent us from fully understanding the cultural industries, and be less congenial– socially and politically – than we might be inclined to imagine.
Conceptions of value
How have the cultural industries been hitherto valued? The original use of the term
‘culture industry’ was resolutely unequivocal, and largely pejorative, reflecting Adorno and Horkheimer’s (1944/1992) dismay at the expanding commodification of human creativity. Here the cultural industries were largely valueless– at least in the aesthetico-idealist terms favoured by the Frankfurt School. Adorno argued that through industrial standardisation and mediation, all good culture came inevitably to a bad end. What value remained was only that lodged in capital accrued– the tainted profits of vulgarity and destruction.
The subsequent development of the‘mass’ cultural industries has, of course, seen the concept gradually re-evaluated in more upbeat terms– not least by those industry actors, national governments and policy makers keen to nurture and reap the economic rewards provided by its component activities. Today, the cultural industries are understood somewhat less as manifestations of a corrupted Enlightenment and rather more as vanguard executants of post-industrial economic growth. Now, re-packaged as the ‘creative industries’, the cultural industries are most commonly regarded as hugely valuable contributors to the wider ‘creative economy’ of information, knowledge and symbolic commodities– vital sources of national wealth, as well as social innovation and cohesion (Work Foundation, 2007; DCMS 2008; NESTA, 2013; UNESCO, 2013).
Yet between these poles lies a somewhat turbulent history that reveals another vital and enduring value of the cultural industries– at least from the perspective of critical social science and the humanities, and many practitioners and consumers alike. This is the value of cultural industries as contexts for the cultivation of counter-vailing forms of political, social and cultural expression, association and critique.
During the 20th century, a gradual shift towards understanding cultural industries as means for producing symbolic and expressive life – and not merely commodities – helped moved analysis beyond the petrifying austerity of Frankfurt critical theory, as well as frame the subsequent range of national and popular re-evaluations of the role and value of the commercial media, art and culture of high or late modernity. The re-evaluation of the cultural industries in post-Second World War European and United States contexts was marked by recognition of their increasingly important value economically, in the midst of developing consumer societies, and their role in enhancing the polity in liberal democracies, by helping to effect forms of public debate, popular representation and self-expression (see Miège, 1979; Hesmondhalgh, 2007; O’Connor, 2011).
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In essence, then, we have three discrete values for cultural industries– three different, seemingly incommensurable, conceptions of their worth. Cultural industries as valueless, or as economically or culturally valued. These continue to be publicly rehearsed, in ways that solidify their enduring and singular status. But here I want to explore the intersections between them– or rather the latter two – by drawing attention to the durability of an interstitial order of value located between economic rationality and cultural critique.
This might seem curious given the current primacy afforded ‘creative economy’
policy and rhetoric. Indeed, it has become common to claim that the kind of rationality underpinning creative economy thinking has fatally damaged any other competing value, including those long-established components of culture and critique (McRobbie, 2002; Miller, 2009). I would suggest, however, that this is not entirely the case, and that while cultural value might well be degraded, it is far from destroyed. Indeed, I’ll argue it would be hard for this to occur, since part of what defines cultural industries is the existence of an intrinsic space of possibility at the interface of culture and economy, foundationally generative of both commodification and forms of cultural repre-sentation, meaning and critique. As we’ll see, while the economic and the cultural might exist as relatively discrete and free-standing values, in the cultural industries their production (and destruction) relies necessarily on their dialectical dependency.
Economic value – creating the creatives
The UK creative industries appeared as a specific instrument of government, expe-diently fashioned to help manage a given set of productive activities at a particular historical moment. They arose as a solution to an emergent problem of value– how to value appropriately a set of discrete but interwoven activities, interests and compulsions, sufficient that they might serve the purposes imagined for them.
Let us consider the issues in play at the time of their formation. Why were the creative industries regarded as a vital and necessary innovation and what value were they imagined to provide? Firstly, as Nicholas Garnham (2005) has convincingly argued, the emergence of the creative industries idea in the mid-1990s was linked to state and commercial desires to develop more fully post-industrial‘informational’ or
‘knowledge’ economies based on the production and consumption of immaterial commodities and services, including the kinds of expressive, symbolic or meaning-laden goods usually associated with cultural industries. In the UK the drive to reap the benefits of knowledge and symbol production, and (especially) the intellectual properties that pertained to them demanded a means of classifying and evaluating the kinds of activities likely to generate the commodities identified as crucial to growth. The term‘creative industries’ thereby emerged, providing a frame and context for manifesting and managing a set of objects that could be harnessed to deliver some demonstrable (new) economic outcomes. By the admission of some the principal architects and proponents this was an exercise in uncertainty, something of a tentative step into ‘unchartered territory’ (Newbigin, 2011: 232). In some ways, then, in the contingency of its genesis, ‘creative industries’ offered nothing more than a working grammar for codifying a set of existing and emergent objects that appeared to
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possess some kind of family resemblance – a means for a willing and responsive government to adjust itself to the contours of a rapidly shifting economic terrain.
Yet the choices made were not accidental. The primacy given to intellectual property exploitation was reflected in the chosen composition of the creative sector – which rather oddly included advertising and software production (hitherto not widely regarded as cultural industries per se)– inclusions that allowed the sector to be presented as more economically significant and more substantially geared to the
‘new’ economy than might have otherwise been assumed. For Garnham, the creative industries entailed the value ascribed to the cultural industries becoming more or less solely re-calculated in terms of the priority accorded to new, intellectual property driven media and technology businesses– where beefed-up estimates of productive activity could act as a magnet for UK Treasury support and also demonstrate the seriousness with which the UK was able to meet the kind of new economy challenges being identified internationally by the EU, UNESCO, the World Bank and other development agencies.
Garnham’s analysis serves to explain some of the desire to bring cultural industries into the new economy fold. Clearly, however, other factors were in play, helping to usher in the particular idea of creative industries. While it might be suggested that the creative industries concept appeared as something of a speculative gambit, much was revealed in the deliberate (and value-laden) shift from the‘cultural’ to the ‘creative’.
Partly, the use of the creative industries was about avoiding accusations of‘elitism’
and separating out public support for the creative industries from traditional patronage of the arts and culture– this was resolutely not about supporting ‘market failure’ but about encouraging returnable ‘investment’. Indeed, as commercial success emerged as the principal arbiter of value– what sold was what mattered – the market’s appa-rently liberating tendencies helped push aside other (non-economic) concerns and expressions of democracy. This included the idea of cultural industries that had reappeared in the UK in the early 1980s as an organising frame to describe the small, local, popular culture industries that were springing up in post-industrial inner cities.
In this context, Garnham’s own key position paper (see Garnham, 1990), written for the left-wing Greater London Council (GLC), articulated a vision of cultural industries as both commercial and popular, ideally geared towards providing ordinary people with the kinds of texts and experiences they valued. This assumed an important role for the market and the (local) state in enabling such culture to be made, relatively distinct from big business and the kinds of ostensibly ‘elitist’ or non-commercial
‘high’ culture conventionally supported by national government. Here culture was tied to economy, but mainly in the interests of enhancing the democratic polity.
While the proposed cultural industry policies for the GLC were never fully imple-mented, there was enough piecemeal activity in London, and more concrete policy and self-organised developments in regional (predominantly‘Old’ Labour) cities such as Sheffield, Liverpool and Manchester, to show that popular culture was becoming increasingly linked to both employment creation and forms of social cohesion, representation and renewal, linked often to a progressive politics (Hesmondhalgh, 2007). The idea that culture industries could provide employment and generate socio-cultural benefits for marginal groups had obvious appeal to the left, seduced by the egalitarian and integrative drives underpinning such innovations (Pratt, 2005).
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In many of these industries, in idealised terms, economic potentials and material existences were clearly conjoined to practitioner’s own valued capacities to express and articulate their lived cultural experience, including, often, the production of oppositional meanings and social critique. But as demonstrably cultural industries – with the duality of culture and economy finely balanced in productive tension – these activities obtained a less positive evaluation than the emergent and favoured kinds of ‘new’ creative entrepreneurialism that appeared to privilege commerce primarily, and culture secondarily, if at all.
We might also note that the arrival of the creative industries coincided with moves to deregulate and marketise the major cultural industries and their con-stituent labour markets (especially in state cultural institutions, such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) or in the state-licensed network of commercial televi-sion broadcasting companies; also the print newspaper industries). This process involved disintegrating existing socialities and cultures through‘flexible’ contract and employment reform– as well as making attacks on perceived ‘closed shops’ and vested interests, on unions and perceived leftist blocs populating the more significant state and commercial cultural industries. The idea of thinking of such industries anew in
‘creative’ terms arguably helped draw attention away from some of their inherited ‘cul-tural’ baggage, and helped to focus light on the productive individual; the self-creative person, working within– but now more productively released from – organisation.
Arguably, then, evaluation migrated from a concern with the generative contra-dictions that had animated many previous advocates of cultural industries– namely, the productive interface of culture and economics, premised on appreciation of the intrinsic value ascribed to vernacular art and culture production, as a means of mobilising a plural set of possibilities, of which economic development was merely one – towards a more commercially directed initiative marked by a commitment to the kinds of enterprise culture underpinning (what has now become) the creative economy. This is not to say, of course, that culture (or even the idea of the social) entirely disappeared, rather to note that it became subordinate to, or was made to appear correspondent with, this purposeful re-evaluation of the role of cultural industry, amidst much broader transformations of society and economy. The shift to bland and individualistic notions of social ‘access’ and ‘inclusion’, and creative, competitive individualism, away from cultural collectivity (often hooked to innova-tions in gentrification and ‘culture-led regeneration’) became the binding mode of attribution for culture, as for those social and political realms deemed peripheral to the core purpose of effectively managing economic re-adjustment and growth.
The consummation of this shift now seems apparent in the positive value afforded UK‘creative economy’ initiatives, where the idea of a tension or incommensurability between culture and economy has been more fully effaced. Indeed some of the more recent UK policy discussions and interventions (e.g. DCMS, 2008, 2014; NESTA, 2013; British Council, 2010; CBI, 2014) make little or no mention of the non-economic values or capacities of art and culture at all. Such ideas appear to have sunk without trace beneath the horizon of an apparently harmonious and generalised sociability that is valued only as the source of a vastly expanded repertoire of ‘innovation’,
‘creative occupations’ (including many lying beyond the creative industries) and
‘creative’ commodities (NESTA, 2013).
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This critical narrative is well-rehearsed and highly credible– up to a point. What remains unclear is whether such shifts have now fully disabled the kinds of critical autonomy and cultural value argued to pre-date the creative industries moment (McRobbie, 2002). In fact, while it is tempting to reduce the present to a simple story of the triumph of individualism, economy and empirics over culture, politics and meaning, this would traduce a more complex reality (O’Connor, 2011). Certainly, the logic of the market has assumed a greater precedence, and in some quarters the possibilities of critique and cultural politics have been curtailed or forced into retreat;
but equally, we should note, in others they have flourished – realised in the now intensified pursuit of various cultural alternatives, heterodoxies and forms of the common. This suggests less a pre-determined and straightforward displacement of cultural value by the economic, but instead a more complex and uncertain dialectic.
So while the rise of the creative industries marks a significant advance for some instrumental, economic values, the negative impacts of which are rightly decried, in the next section I will outline why, in the cultural industries, the value of culture– as politics and critique – must remain both a durable and essential component of the cultural industries, even in the face of its current degradation.
Cultural value– an intrinsic good?
To some it might seem banal to note that cultural value lies at the heart of cultural industries. Yet it is also important to recognise that this is not an incidental facility but an abiding structural feature. Indeed, while the precise meaning or definition of
‘cultural value’ continues to provoke intense debate, this is of less concern here than acknowledging its pervasive durability as a focus for organising action and its valua-tion as an intrinsic good. First, the desire to pursue and maintain some specifically critical, cultural value in cultural (or even ‘creative’) work exists as a foundational organising principle, widely (if not universally) held by those engaged in the kinds of artistic, creative or aesthetic practices that underpin cultural industry production.
Such desires are not just individually held, but are of course institutionally embedded in the various forms of state and community support for arts and culture, and (less markedly) in commercial endeavours. In such contexts, culture is generally regarded as an intrinsic good with‘transformative value’, and a kind of ‘meta-good’ (as Russell Keat, 2000: 157 terms it), a good that endows people with the capacity to reflect on the quality and necessity of other kinds of goods. In generating symbolic meaning, cultural industries provide a context and resource for evaluating the prevailing order of life. This sense of culture has, of course, come under various forms of attack– but it has by no means disappeared.
Second, and less obviously, recognition and provision for cultural value also exists as structural precondition for effectively operating capitalism. This is because pro-viding cultural workers with relative autonomy (or ‘cultural freedom’) to fashion demonstrably new goods remains the best guarantee of any future accumulation.
How so? As Bill Ryan has deftly observed, the cultural industries are suspended on a tension between providing cultural workers with cultural and artistic freedom and curtailing and managing that freedom:
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The historical problem facing capitalists engaged in the production and circulation of cultural commodities has been how to devise a system of employment which enables artists to create genuine original and marketable works of art which are stamped with signs of genius, but which also dis-ciplines the creative process and bring it under the control of thefirm, such that management may set the standards, rate and timing of creation and
The historical problem facing capitalists engaged in the production and circulation of cultural commodities has been how to devise a system of employment which enables artists to create genuine original and marketable works of art which are stamped with signs of genius, but which also dis-ciplines the creative process and bring it under the control of thefirm, such that management may set the standards, rate and timing of creation and