The Cultural Industries
Download 0.61 Mb. View original pdf
|
| Cultural economy Finally, an interesting cultural studies perspective on economic life known as ‘cultural economy’ (Amin and Thrift, 2004; du Gay and Pryke, 2002) is some- times understood as an analysis of the cultural industries, but, in fact, most of the researchers who employ this term have broader ambitions than this. Their aim is to apply post-structuralist cultural studies insights to production and to economic life in general; Foucault was an influence here too. Cultural economy, in this sense, sees the realm of economic practice – in all its vari- ous forms, such as markets and economic and organisational relations – as formatted and framed by economic discourses (du Gay and Pryke, 2002: 2), and makes this the starting point for analysis rather than placing it as a sup- plement to existing economic or political-economic analysis. This certainly does not preclude analysis of the cultural industries and some work has been published under this banner, but there has been rather too little of such work to constitute a distinctive approach to the cultural industries (as opposed to an approach to production or the economy in general). However, cultural economy raises issues about how to ground critique of developments in the cultural industries. The cultural economy approach encourages us to question the easy dichotomies that some political economists and soci- ologists of culture draw between the realm of culture and the increasing encroachment of economics on that realm. However, the deconstruction of such binary oppositions can neglect important political and ethical questions with regard to relations between culture and commerce. For example, are there potentially harmful effects to commodification? All societies reserve some aspects of the world – nature, personhood or culture, for example – from commodification. What aspects of culture might contemporary soci- eties shelter from exchange and private ownership and on what grounds? (These issues are fruitfully pursued, for example, by John Frow, 1997, him- self a cultural studies analyst. I return to them in relation to cultural produc- tion in Chapter 2.) Download 0.61 Mb. Share with your friends:
|