POLITICAL ECONOMY Culture Works the Political Economy of Culture.Pdf

Culture Works Cultural Politics A series from the Social Text Collective 18. Culture Works: The Political Economy of Culture Richard Maxwell, editor 17. Out at Work: Building a Gay–Labor Alliance Kitty Krupat and Patrick McCreery, editors 16. SportCult Randy Martin and Toby Miller, editors 15. Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of History Gregory Elliott 14. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, editors 13. Changing Life: Genomes, Ecologies, Bodies, Commodities Peter J. Taylor, Saul E. Halfon, and Paul N. Edwards, editors 12. Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis Cary Nelson, editor 11. Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat, editors 10. Spectacles of Realism: Gender, Body, Genre Margaret Cohen and Christopher Prendergast, editors 9. Cultural Materialism: On Raymond Williams Christopher Prendergast, editor 8. Socialist Ensembles: Theater and State in Cuba and Nicaragua Randy Martin 7. The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere Richard Burt, editor 6. Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory Michael Warner, editor 5. The Phantom Public Sphere Bruce Robbins, editor 4. On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture George Yúdice, Jean Franco, and Juan Flores, editors 3. Technoculture Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, editors 2. Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics Bruce Robbins, editor 1. Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism Andrew Ross, editor Richard Maxwell editor A Cultural Politics Book for the Social Text Collective Culture Works The Political Economy of Culture Cultural Politics / Volume 18 University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London Copyright 2001 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Culture works : the political economy of culture / Richard Maxwell, editor. p. cm. — (Cultural politics ; v. 18) “A cultural politics book for the Social Text Collective.” Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8166-3600-1 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8166-3601-X (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Culture—Economic aspects. 2. Culture—Political aspects. 3. Popular culture—Economic aspects. 4. Popular culture—Political aspects. 5. Politics and culture. I. Maxwell, Richard, 1957– II. Title. III. Cultural politics (Minneapolis, Minn.) ; v. 18. HM621 .C865 2001 306—dc21 2001001410 The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 121110090807060504030201 10987654321 To the memory of Herbert I. Schiller (1919–2000) This page intentionally left blank Contents 1 1. Why Culture Works Richard Maxwell 22 2. Art Danielle Fox 60 3. Beer Ben Scott 83 4. Advertising Inger L. Stole 107 5. Dance Anna Beatrice Scott 131 6. Sport David L. Andrews 163 7. Shopping Susan G. Davis 197 8. The Web Chad Raphael 225 9. Media Michael Curtin and Thomas Streeter 251 Contributors 253 Index This page intentionally left blank Chapter One Why Culture Works Richard Maxwell When we read best-selling books, go to movies, drink a beer, visit art museums, surf the Web, head out to the mall, flip through cable channels, go dancing, check a baseball score, or see an advertisement, we customarily ignore the political economy that hammers these features of culture into shape. For the most part, while we are out on the town or lounging with our feet up at the end of the day to watch TV we don’t think about corporate boardroom votes, lobbyists, public funding of the arts, the end of the Cold War, post-Fordist restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, stock swaps, intel- lectual property, intercapitalist battles, the class divisions of public space, or investment banks. Except for those whose job it is to know about such things, the rest of us would rarely say that any politico-economic force has any effect on culture as we know it. Because our lives appear to play out a good distance beyond the horizon of the political economy, we are not in the habit of making that connection. For that reason, voices that are critical of the political economy can seem to be speaking an incomprehensible lan- guage, one that doesn’t easily mesh with our experience or knowledge of culture. This book aims to change that by offering readers a number of ways to link cultural experience to political economy. The authors collected here grapple with topics that provide them with a basis for a hard and honest look at those aspects of the political economy that have shaped the contours of familiar spaces and activities in everyday life. This book was designed to unsettle and provoke readers. It is a dangerous book for no other reason than that the authors have torn down the imaginary walls separating culture, economics, and politics. The definition of culture guiding these writers begins instead as a call to cross established borders between anthropology, sociolo- gy, art history, economics, communication and media studies, political theory, and performance. This attitude impels us to consider life in its totality, knowing that our attempt to do so will amplify the ethical and political di- lemmas that confront us. Culture works because culture is first of all the sum of stories we tell ourselves about who we are and want to be, individually and collectively. Culture works also as the staging ground of these identity narratives and of our daily routines. Culture comprises and constitutes the places where we 1 Richard Maxwell live; it is the built environment and the peopled landscape. It also works in the memories that reside in the flesh, from the spark of recognition, an un- canny remembrance, to the dull reflex of forgetting and the dogged re- minders inhabiting bone and muscle of a body once stretched in sport, child- birth, dance, labor, lovemaking. Culture works in the traditional sense as well, as sources of cultural wealth—the patrimony of state, nation, people— commissioned and collected through private and public patronage and stored in museums, galleries, film archives, corporate offices, or displayed in parks, plazas, and other public spaces. Finally, culture works in the ordinary sense of work taking place in the factories, studios, warehouses, schoolrooms, and other sites of cultural realization. Culture works where people work building the material fund, or hardware, from which we draw conceptual and narra- tive sustenance to understand the world. Every phone, computer, television, film stage, tapestry, celluloid strip, videotape, computer disk, semiconductor, printing press, cargo vehicle, or any other imaginable tool or bricks and mor- tar structure used in the culture industries embodies this culture work. Work is ironically the hardest part of the Culture Works to see. In part, this is caused by cultural labor’s dispersion and submersion in the contemporary political economy’s international division of labor. But work, even our own culture work, is also obscured by the mist of enchantment that sur- rounds the Culture Works and all the goods and services associated with it. Differential power in the division of cultural labor helps to foster this illu- sion too, for it is ordered as a hierarchy that grants an elite corps of culturati located in the world’s richest regions a weighty social presence. We remem- ber them. They even live in places we customarily call cultural capitals: London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles . To find the bulk of the labor in the Culture Works, however, one has to descend, in a sense, from these com- manding heights to encounter the earthly reality of cultural production oc- curring everywhere from schoolrooms to New York and London’s sweat- shops to the shop floors in poor and industrializing countries around the world.1 Consider what we might find in this encounter: media and communication industries so completely unfettered by government regulation that they can set up operations across the planet wherever they find the best cost op- tions, destroying time-honored national economies and displacing people from traditional areas of work. With deregulated airlines, freight, and com- puterized telecommunications making far-flung and flexible operations pos- sible, new regional pools of cultural labor are channeled into a transnational network. At the heart of this global Culture Works are low-wage jobs in the telephone and computer industries, film and TV production, electronics, 2 Why Culture Works call-processing centers, and every other information technology–based en- terprise. Culture works here on the backs of “investment hungry communi- ties all over the world” who are forced “into common labor and consump- tion pools” and into unwanted competition with their counterparts in other nations who, like them, are compelled to win investment and jobs by lower- ing wages and benefit scales.2 Culture works also by encouraging us to forget about the work in culture. Forgetting is part of the enchantment of fashion, TV, sport, art, music, dance, and so on. The problem of enchantment is taken up later, but

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