'Never Mind the Economy. Here's Culture'

Section-2.qxd 6/5/02 9:09 PM Page 89 Section 2 THE CULTURE OF ECONOMY Edited by Trevor Barnes Introduction: ‘Never Mind the Economy. Here’s Culture’ Trevor Barnes Culture is not a decorative addendum Grundy’s LTV ‘Today’ programme, listened to the ‘hard world’ of production and to my conservative (and Conservative) aunts things, the icing on the cake of the with whom I lived tell me that they were an material world. (Hall, 1988) ‘abomination’ and a ‘disgrace’ (and which conse- quently immensely magnified them in my esti- It is possible to argue that economic mation), and walked with my friends on a geographers have become some of Saturday afternoon down King’s Road, Chelsea, the leading exponents of cultural geo- outwardly sneering at the punk fashion scene graphy. (Thrift, 2000a: 692) around me and which the Pistols exemplified – [P]unk became real culture … ripped jeans and T-shirts, green- and red-dyed [making] ordinary social life seem like hair, Doc Marten boots, and the ubiquitous use a trick, the result of sado-masochistic of safety pins for tethering things that should economics. (Marcus, 1989: 69) never be tethered – but inwardly admiring, and secretly wishing to join in. I got the Sex Pistols’ album ‘Never Mind the The Pistols were a cultural revelation. Bollocks. Here’s the Sex Pistols’ the first day it Their ferocious energy and sound of ‘broken was for sale in October 1977. I bought it at glass and rusty razor blades’ (Savage, 1993: the HMV store on Oxford Street in London. 206) were the perfect antidote to the bloated, It came in plain brown wrapping to prevent self-indulgent, and anodyne music of such upright Londoners from swooning at the sight groups as the Eagles or Genesis that charac- of vulgar language. Two tracks from it were in terized the first part of the decade, and to effect banned by the BBC and other radio whom I was subjected as a teenager. As Savage stations (although John Peel played them): the writes, ‘At a time when songs generally dealt Pistols’ contribution to the Queen’s Silver Jubilee with the pop archetypes of escape or love, the celebrations, ‘God Save the Queen’, and their Sex Pistols threw up a series of insults and demonic version of national political analysis, rejections, couched in a new pop language that ‘Anarchy in the UK’. I never saw them perform was tersely allusive and yet recognisable as live, but watched them on TV throw around everyday speech’ (1993: 206). That language, chairs as well as four-letter words on Bill along with the Pistols’ clothing, hair style, body Section-2.qxd 6/5/02 9:09 PM Page 90 90 THE CULTURE OF ECONOMY piercing, snarling, and swearing all seemed for in different parts of economic geography, me at the time a seductive oppositional youth respectively, in production, labour markets, culture and way of life that uncannily matched finance, and consumption.This is new. Until the the mid to late 1970s England of strikes, dis- recent past, culture was a dirty term within content, and resentment in which I lived. I the discipline; its use met with the same word even thought they might have something to that the London Metropolitan Police were so say to geographers, and cheekily titled one of anxious to conceal from the Sex Pistols’ my third-year undergraduate papers ‘Never album cover. One result, as Thrift puts it, was Mind the Truth. Here’s the Ideologues’, a first that ‘by the 1980s economic geography was in foray into the world of intellectual anarchy. a pretty moribund state, at risk of boring its For this section of the book, and for my audience to death’ (2000a: 692). It was as if the own editorial introduction, I’ve again cheekily Eagles and Genesis had left the world of misappropriated the Pistols’ title, and on their pop music, and taken up home in economic own silver jubilee. (Will anyone sing ‘God Save geography. But things are changing. During the the Pistols?’) My contention is that the history 1990s, economic geographers began opening of the band and their record raise the same up a Pandora’s box of culture, to use Thrift’s issue that is at the centre of the four contri- (2000a) metaphor. And once opened there butions in this section of the Handbook: the is no closing it again. Furthermore, as also in relationship between culture and economy. that original myth, what remains after the lid is This might appear a stretch even for a book in off is hope. The same holds true here. In this cultural geography. But in both popular and case, the hope as economic geography academic treatments of the Sex Pistols, what engages culture is for a vibrant, energetic, and emerges is a tension between them as a voice edgy discipline, a punk economic geography. of culture and as an economic commodity. In this editorial introduction, I begin by On the one hand, they represented a distinct briefly reviewing some of the different posi- ‘break in the pop milieu … nothing like it had tions on the culture versus economy issue, and been heard in rock ‘n’ roll before and nothing then examine how they have been worked out like it has been heard since’ (Marcus, 1989: in the discipline. There are no easy solutions. 2–3). As the Radio One DJ John Peel put it, Almost everyone except for a ‘paid-up member ‘You went to the gigs and there was a feeling of the Khmer Rouge’ (Eagleton, 1995: 35) that you were participating in something that thinks that it is not either/or but both/and had come from another planet, it seemed so when it comes to culture and economy. But remarkable it was happening at all’ (quoted in the difficult issue is their precise relation and Marcus, 1989: 41). If the hallmarks of culture theorization. are innovation, new forms of language, and changed values and ways of life, the Sex Pistols were real culture. On the other hand, the CULTURE VERSUS ECONOMY Pistols from their very creation were of making money, of selling product, of generating ‘filthy lucre’, of being part of ‘the great rock‘n’roll Terry Eagleton’s (2000) ‘manifesto’ on culture swindle’ (Mitchell, 2000: 68). It was not for begins with the term’s tangled and ambivalent nothing that they recorded with on-the-run etymological meaning.At first culture ‘denoted great train robber Ronnie Biggs, that Johnny a thoroughly material process’, that of culti- Rotten engaged in an eight-year legal suit with vating the land, of using brawn, skill, and Malcolm McLaren, the Pistols’ manager, to material resources to put food on the table recover unpaid royalties (Lydon, 1994: Chapters (2000: 1). Later, though, the word is ‘metaphori- 19–20), or that McLaren himself coined the cally transposed to affairs of the spirit’ (2000: 1), slogan ‘cash from chaos’. becoming a Bach fugue, a Botticelli portrait, a The four contributors to this section of the Balzac novel. book – Linda McDowell, Adam Tickell, Meric The word [culture] thus charts within its semantic Gertler,and Don Slater – see the same kind of unfolding humanity’s own historic shift from rural to tension between culture and economy that urban existence, pig-farming to Picasso, tilling the soil to I am claiming for the Sex Pistols playing out splitting the atom. In Marxist parlance, it brings Section-2.qxd 6/5/02 9:09 PM Page 91 INTRODUCTION 91 together both base and superstructure in a single say, political economy should become cultural notion. (2000: 1) economy’ (2000: 1231). Or Neil Smith, who in his earlier days trumpeted ‘the universaliza- Culture and economy are yoked from the tion of value in the form of abstract labour’ beginning, and the supposed opposition (1984: 82), now says, ‘“Back-to-class” in any between a basic, brute materialist logic, and an narrow sense is its own self-defeating cul- ethereally refined non-materialist one, is false. de-sac’ (2000: 1028), and it is necessary ‘to Eagleton’s reference to Marxism is also useful. find a way of integrating class into the issues Marxism has been the main forum in which of identity and cultural politics’ (2000: 1011). debates about that yoking have been staged, at David Harvey is maybe one of the few least in the post-war period, and certainly in holdouts, although his own position has never economic geography. been straightforward. At the very least there That Marxism has played that role is is a disjuncture between the prefaces and unsurprising. Neoclassical economics, which introductions to his books, which are lithe and offers the principal (and orthodox) alternative limber, with references to novelists, popular interpretation of the economy, has no truck culture, and the cultural situation of Harvey with culture, reducing it to the ‘colorless himself, and the body of the text that follows, blanket’ of utility-maximizing rational agents which often goes in for categorical statements (Georgescu-Roegen, 1968: 264). As Margaret about the paramount importance of the eco- Thatcher might have said, ‘There is no such nomy. His latest book, Spaces of Hope (2000: thing as culture.’ In contrast, culture is there Chapter 1), gives both perspectives in the from the beginning in Marx’s analysis. His most same introductory chapter, ‘The Difference a succinct and perhaps best-known theoretical Generation Makes’. Harvey provides a won- statement is found in the Preface to A Contri- derfully evocative account of his own shifting bution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). cultural position as a university teacher run- There he writes, ‘the mode of production of ning an annual seminar since 1971 on Marx’s material life conditions the social, political and Capital (Volume 1) in American and British intellectual life process in general.

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