Abstract: Shortly after taking up his new position of Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Andy Burnham launched the government’s latest ‘strategy for the creative economy’. Creative Britain: New Talents for the New Economy promises to continue the shift from an economic to a cultural understanding of economies, to ‘build a dynamic and vibrant society, providing entertainment alongside opportunity’ (DCMS, 2008). While it offers a clear definition of which industries are the ‘creative’ ones (1), Creative Britain is far from transparent regarding what it means by ‘culture’. Throughout the document ‘culture’ is equated with an unproblematised national identity and with an Arnoldian exploitation of community and customs as a centripetal unifying force (see Arnold, 1869 and Gordon Brown, below). On the other hand ‘culture’ is repeatedly described as ‘entertainment’, a sector of the economy, a type of entrepreneurialism. In both senses, ‘culture’ is a phantom, an entirely empty self-validating buzz word. No external validating contexts are intimated, its meaning and the values it invokes are taken as a given. New Labour has been playing this game of hide and seek with loaded terms such as ‘culture’, ‘new’, ‘modern’ and the ‘social’, for a long time now. This culturalisation of politics is nothing new; nor is the service economy to which it is shackled particularly ‘new’. What then does Creative Britain signify? Is it synonymous with the ideological triumph of the ‘cultural economy’ – the thesis that the economy has become encultured, less use-centred. Is the Laddie really for cultural turn-ing? The cultural turn has had an enormous impact in all fields of knowledge and labour (see Jameson, 1998; Ray and Sayer, 1999). It raises the importance of an expanded definition of what we call ‘creativity’ by encouraging meaning-centred research methodologies to be adopted in all walks of life. We thus live in a highly pragmatic era wherein all forms of knowledge are held to be contingent upon specific cultural assumptions. This means that all phenomena demand to be viewed from multiple perspectives in order to ensure parity and appropriateness. Dialectical materialism and monetarism are, in this light, absurdly reductionist in equal measure. While the cultural turn is often taken to involve a reversal of the base-superstructure model favoured by vulgar Marxists and the New Right alike, it actually involves a much more explicit rejection of such dialectical thought – a desire to destroy the old culture/economy dualism. As die-hard economists, most politicians are ill-equipped to engage with this paradigm shift (see Bonnell, Hunt and Biernacki, 1999). While New Labour pride themselves in their cosmopolitan cultural credentials, they are, in practice, not often so different from their peers in this respect. As a blueprint for a post-cultural turn nation, Creative Britain often reads as a dinosaur, fixated with the role that culture can play in developing the economy
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 2
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