Choice, Reflexivity and ‘Alternative’ Cultural Work

Abstract

Critical theory and governmental approaches suggest that cultural work has come to be dominated either by the consolidation of the ‘culture industry’ (through industrialization and the degradation of independent craft production) or through neo-liberal discourses of ‘enterprise’ that enable the administration of creative endeavour. In these scenarios, cultural workers are seen to be deprived of autonomy and bereft of meaningful identity as a consequence of their increased alienation from the conditions of production, or through the conformity and discipline now imposed by governmental ‘mechanisms of rule’. Furthermore, as both approaches identify, the increasingly ‘uncreative’ cultural work that remains will become pervasively more precarious as the shift to a flexible and globalized economy leads capital to further rationalize its commitments to labour through programmes of institutional ‘delayering’, introducing casual, non-standard and unstable forms of employment and dismantling collective systems of recognition and reward. It is additionally argued that increases in the relative strength of capital over labour will further reduce opportunities for workers’ resistance to temporary insubordinations and ‘tactical’ interventions of limited impact. Now, for both critical theorists and governmentalists, the cultural worker appears a fully individualized subject, one who must endure artistic disaffection and the constant stress of self-reliance under prevailing conditions of enhanced economic uncertainty.