Culture, Industry & Work Through the Gift Shop

The question of INDUSTRY

Adorno: ‘Culture industry reconsidered’inNew German Critique, 6, Fall 1975, 12-19

Hesmondalgh: ‘Creative and Cultural Industries’ in Bennett, (2008): The Sage Handbook of Cultural Analysis 552–569

The Culture Industry or Cultural Industries?

Adorno – standardisation (of cultural products and consumers)• Popular music (and jazz) – mass consumption, formula, subjugation• THE culture industry = monolothic, standardised• Political economy account – sets up mass production against the creative

(high) artist.

Hesmondalgh – plural cultural industries• Symbolic creators – degrees of creative autonomy, complexity and

difference• Socio-cultural account – looks at structure / agency dynamics• Compares creative workers’ levels of freedom to other industries• Emphasises “contested ground’ upon which different kinds of cultural texts

are produced” (Laughey, 2007: 126)

Culture | Industry

Adorno: ‘mass culture’ is structural: The cultural commodities of the industry are governed, as value, and not by their own specific content and harmonious formation. Anti-enlightenment

Only their deep unconscious mistrust, the last residue of the difference between art and empirical reality in the spiritual make-up of the masses explains why they have not, to a person, long since perceived and accepted the world as it is constructed for them by the culture industry.

Hesmondhalgh: ‘Cultural Industries’ = an attempt to pluralize Adorno’s flawed theory. Emphasis on contradiction and complexity in neo-liberal context. Those who prefer the term ‘cultural industries’ tend to be much more sober in their claims regarding the role of culture or creativity in modern economies and societies, and, as we shall see, considerably more sceptical about the benefits of marketization in the domain of culture, than what we might call the creativity or creative industries theorists.

Work

Adorno: transformations in the industrial production of art (Frankfurt School neo-Marxist tradition – along with Benjamin’s ‘mechanical reproduction’).

Hesmondalgh: creative labour as “communication of experience through symbolic reproduction” (from Raymond Williams’ ‘Long Revolution’).

Key ideas: autonomy (workplace + creative), self-realisation, divisions of labour.

Culture Industry, Creative Industry, Creative Work

Mass media central to consumer economy since 1950s.

Internet, social media and inter-active media – paradigm shift?

Lopez (2012) – 4 elements to neo-liberal hegemony of culture:

• Privatisation• Commodification • Crisis for control • Enclosure of creative commons – by corporations.

Autonomy of the creative worker:

Policies that argue for a radical expansion of these industries under present conditions, without attention to the conditions of creative labour, risk fuelling labour markets marked by irregular, insecure and unprotected work. (Hesmondalgh)

Sociological focus in STRUCTURE and AGENCY (Bourdieu, Giddens).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBTSlwwzuYo

Discussion

• Creative Labour• Authenticity• Autonomy• Culture • INDUSTRIES – Art, Film, Museum, Graffiti

Group 1 - What would Adorno say?Group 2 - Apply Hesmondalgh?

Complex

Key themes for MACME unit

Dynamic relationships between:

Culture / Media Industry

CreativityWork

Media academics and teachers often over-simplify these. So don’t.