Neoliberal Culture

This opening chapter traces the rise of neoliberalism to hegemonic dominance in the world as a whole since the 1970s and examines salient aspects of its impact on the cultural field.¹ How do we explain the relation of neoliberal ideology and political economy to art in particular and culture in general? Such a task requires a wider-ranging and critical methodology for analysing the politics of culture holistically instead of merely supplementing study of cultural policy with a broadening notion of, say, ‘implicit policy’. For an inclusive treatment of the issues at stake concerning neoliberal culture, then, the chapter draws upon the interdisciplinary resources of cultural studies and the social sciences.

Introducing a volume of papers from a conference held at the Free University in Berlin during November 2010 and gathered together under the title of The Cultural Career of Coolness, Ulla Haselstein and Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit say:

Cool is an American (English) word that has been integrated into the vocabulary of many languages around the globe. Today it is a term most often used in advertising trendy commodities, or, more generally, in promoting urban lifestyles in our postmodern age. But what is the history of the term ‘cool’? When has coolness come to be associated with contemporary self-fashioning?¹

The campaign of New York Times journalist Charles Duhigg and his colleagues against the outsourcing of iPhone assembly to China through the Taiwanese company Foxconn was waged on behalf of US workers because it resulted in domestic job losses and high unemployment. While disputing the critical assumption that it is ‘only about cheap labor’, these campaigning journalists also showed some concern for Chinese workers:

The Taiwanese company has a million workers, many willing to live in company dorms, work midnight shifts and spend 12 hours in a factory, six days a week. Chinese workers are cheaper than their American counterparts — but just as important, they are more flexible and plentiful, and thousands can be hired overnight.¹

This chapter looks at a specific art-world development that promotes the neoliberal usurpation of the public sector in the cultural field and, in an exemplary case, virtually replaces it: ‘the Saatchi phenomenon’ and the marketing of cool art in general. It also looks at a marginalised counterpoint to that phenomenon as a reminder of cultural opposition to capitalism and inequality.¹

As Raymond Williams (1963 [1958]) insisted in his early classic Culture and Society, ‘The history of our idea of culture is a record of our reactions, in thought and feeling, to the changed conditions of our common life.’² Williams went on later to formulate a paradigm of socio-cultural research that he named ‘cultural materialism’, which happens to be the chief analytical perspective deployed in the present book. Cultural materialism has been somewhat neglected since Williams’s death in 1988 despite its distinctive combination of critique and policy orientation. Such negligence is probably attributable largely to a diminution of criticism generally regarding capitalism and the broad historical drift in the direction of neoliberal hegemony.

The American educationalist David Blacker has proposed a challenging thesis about the relation between university education and what he calls ‘the eliminationist project — the neoliberal endgame’.¹ His argument derives from a controversial proposition of Karl Marx, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Desperate measures are taken to buck this trend by boosting capital accumulation, typically displacement and technological substitution of labour. Blacker claims that increasing segments of the population are morally written off as no longer exploitable and hence irrelevant to capital accumulation’.² The validity of Blacker’s abstract thesis would seem to be evident in actual developments since the 1970s: with a decreasing number of manual jobs in the West; with widespread youth unemployment in comparatively wealthy countries; with the growth of precarious and lowly paid employment everywhere; with the scandalously intensive and extensive exploitation of manual labour, especially of young women and children, in low-pay locations; and, more generally, in increased inequality within countries and around the whole world.³

This chapter explores the hypothesis that the leading cultural, political and economic features of a given civilisation tend to be implicated in the construction of a preferred self, that is, a discernible social type. The hypothesis does not claim that everyone or even a majority of people within such a civilisation will necessarily display the typical characteristics of a preferred self, merely that there is a social pressure to do so in forming a successful persona. Although the argument here has psychological implications, the proposition concerning a preferred self is principally a sociological proposition about approved identity. The following observations are inspired by Margaret Thatcher’s notorious description of her own politics in 1981, when she remarked that the method is economic but the object is to change the soul.¹

The American management consultant and author of the widely acclaimed book The Rise of the Creative Class,¹ Richard Florida, has advised on public policy in US cities and in several cities around the world. Florida’s ‘creative class’ thesis is particularly relevant to an understanding of how neoliberal ideology is manifested in the politics of culture, as acknowledged in the following quotation from Trine Billie, a Danish cultural-policy researcher: ‘Florida… introduces a new perspective on economic growth that rests upon the presence of creativity.’² According to Florida, economic growth is generated by ‘creative-class’ activity. So, he advises governments in partnership with business — especially in cities that have seen better days — to develop cultural amenities that attract young creative types. Thus inspired, Billie has surveyed the cultural preferences of the ‘creative class’ in her own country of Denmark.

The idea of ‘creativity’ is at once both discredited and extraordinarily fashionable. How could that be? Why such a paradox? It is discredited because the very notion of creativity was once held to be a special attribute, something unusual and rare, confined to only a select few — in origin, God-given. It is unfashionable now because overt elitism (but perhaps not covert elitism) has been outlawed in an illusory culture of democracy. Yet, at the same time, it is a conventional wisdom to say that we are all creative now. That meets the bill of routine populism and, indeed, a banal existentialism that has become pervasive in everyday life, and increasingly so at work. Everyone is creative, so nobody is excluded. However, it also seems that some are more creative than others. ‘Creativity’ is held to be a good thing, so we should all try to achieve it. Faced with such equality of opportunity, some unfortunately fall short and, in consequence, must pay the penalty for their abject inertia, especially in business. Along the way, creativity loses all specificity. It is such a good thing that we can hardly say what it is. It used to be associated most strongly with art, imagination and inspiration. Such associations are too elitist today. People who would not normally be counted as artists are said to be creative too.¹ And, since entrepreneurial business is the stuff of life, surely enterprising individuals must be creative as well.

The public sphere is readily dismissed as an unrealistic notion with no credible purchase on reality. Apart from the cynicism and, indeed, nihilism of such a dismissal, the public sphere is at the very least defensible as an ideal type, that is, a typification of certain essential features of a phenomenon existing to some extent at some time and in some place somewhere. Moreover, without an idea of a preferable condition, something better than that which currently prevails, there are no grounds to question and possibly change present conditions. Such an idea, then, provides a principle of judgement. In this case, it is no less than an official principle implicit in claims to democracy, the practical implementation of which may be called to account with impeccable legitimacy. This is not some unrealistically radical notion. The public sphere is supposed to be the arena of critical disputation, free and open debate of a reasonable kind about issues of interest shared by citizens. It is meant to be a space in which opinions are formed and articulated concerning public interests that should, therefore, be consequential for political process in a democracy. The public sphere is, to paraphrase one of the founders of neoliberal political economy, Walter Lippmann, a dogma of modern liberal democracy.¹

In the 1960s, when the notion of ‘post-industrial society’ was emerging in comparatively rich capitalist countries, it engendered anxiety about what the mass of people would do in the future with their increased leisure time. The automation brought in by ‘post-industrialism’, it was assumed, would release a great many people from tediously repetitive tasks, especially in manufacturing, that could be mechanised and done by robots. Public anxiety during a period of ‘full employment’ was not so much about the peril of poverty-stricken unemployment but, instead, about the impending boredom of affluence with nothing to do. How naive, you might say, since automation today, facilitated by various applications of digital computing to ‘services’ and not only factories, is evidently all about reducing labour power in order to save money on wages. The aim is not some public-spirited policy of freeing people for comfortably-off leisure activity. Instead, automation is more often than not about substituting machines for human beings so as to reduce costs and boost profitability. The consequent abandonment of redundant workers to lives of penury and despair while also denying job opportunities to the young is a matter of indifference to most employers.