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Intermediaries and Imaginaries in the Cultural andCreative IndustriesJustin O'connor a ba School of English, Communications and Performance Studies , Faculty of Arts, MonashUniversity , Melbourne , VIC , 3800 , Australia E-mail:b Visiting Chair, Department of Humanities , Shanghai Jiaotong University , Shanghai ,China E-mail:Published online: 09 Jan 2013.

To cite this article: Justin O'connor (2013): Intermediaries and Imaginaries in the Cultural and Creative Industries,Regional Studies, DOI: 10.1080/00343404.2012.748982

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Intermediaries and Imaginaries in the Culturaland Creative Industries

JUSTIN O’CONNORSchool of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Faculty of Arts, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC 3800,

Australia. Email: oconnorjustin@hotmail.comVisiting Chair, Department of Humanities, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, China

(Received March 2012: in revised form October 2012)

O’CONNOR J. Intermediaries and imaginaries in the cultural and creative industries, Regional Studies. This paper conducts anhistorical and conceptual review of the idea of ‘cultural intermediaries’ and sets up a contrast between the cultural and creativeindustries. It draws on theorizations of ‘economic imaginaries’ and reconstructs the respective imaginaries of cultural and creativeindustries. It suggests that the former was organized around the culturalization of the economy and the second around the econ-omization of culture. Nevertheless, there are complicities between them, not least in the contention that a new set of economicdevelopments would redeem the traditional promises of culture.

Cultural industries Creative industries Cultural intermediaries Cultural economy Neo-liberalism

O’CONNOR J. 文化创意产业中的中介与想象，区域研究。本文对“文化中介”的概念进行历史及概念性的回顾，并将文化产业与创意产业进行对立比较。本文运用“经济想象”的理论，并重新打造对文化产业与创意产业的各自想象。本文主张，前者围绕着经济文化化进行组织，后者则围绕着文化经济化。但两者之间仍有共谋关系，特别是在有关新的经济发展能够恢复文化的传统承诺的论点之中。

文化产业 创意产业 文化中介 文化经济 新自由主义

O’CONNOR J. Les intermédiaires et les imaginaires dans les industries culturelles et créatives,Regional Studies. Le présent article fait lacritique historique et conceptuelle de la notion d’‘intermédaires cuturels’ et met en place une comparaison entre les industries cul-turelles et créatives. On puise dans les propositions théoriques quant aux ‘imaginaires économiques’ et reconstruit respectivement lesimaginaires des industries culturelles et créatives. On laisse supposer que le premier s’organise autour de la culturalisation de l’éco-nomie et le deuxième autour de l’économisation de la culture. Néanmoins, on peut laisser supposer des complicités, notammentdans l’affirmation qu’une nouvelle série de développements économiques redorera les promesses traditionnelles de la culture.

Industries culturelles Industries créatives Intermédiaires culturels Économie culturelle Néo-libéralisme

O’CONNOR J. Vermittler und Imaginäre in den Kultur- und Kreativbranchen, Regional Studies. Dieser Beitrag enthält eine histo-rische und konzeptuelle Überprüfung der Idee der ‘kulturellen Vermittler’ und erzeugt einen Kontrast zwischen den Kultur- undKreativbranchen. Ausgehend von der Theoretisierung der ‘wirtschaftlichen Imaginären’ werden die jeweiligen Imaginären derKultur- und Kreativbranchen rekonstruiert. Es wird argumentiert, dass die Kulturbranchen an der Kulturisierung der Ökonomieund die Kreativbranchen an der Ökonomisierung der Kultur ausgerichtet sind. Dennoch gibt es Komplizitäten zwischen denbeiden Formen, insbesondere im Zusammenhang mit der Behauptung, dass eine neue Reihe von Wirtschaftsentwicklungendie traditionellen Versprechen der Kultur einlösen würde.

Kulturbranchen Kreativbranchen Kulturelle Vermittler Kulturwirtschaft Neoliberalismus

O’CONNOR J. Intermediarios e imaginarios en las industrias culturales y creativas, Regional Studies. En este artículo se realiza unarevisión histórica y conceptual de la idea de los ‘intermediarios culturales’ y se presenta el contraste entre las industrias culturales ycreativas. A partir de las teorizaciones de los ‘imaginarios económicos’ se reconstruyen los respectivos imaginarios de las industriasculturales y creativas. Se argumenta que la industria cultural fue organizada en torno a la culturización de la economía y la industriacreativa en torno a la economización de la cultura. Sin embargo, existen complicidades entre ellas, en particular con relación a laafirmación de que un nuevo grupo de desarrollos económicos redimirían las promesas tradicionales de la cultura.

Industrias culturales Industrias creativas Intermediarios culturales Economía cultural Neoliberalismo

JEL classifications: O10, R10

Regional Studies, pp. 1–14, iFirst article

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INTRODUCTION: CONTESTEDIMAGINARIES

If the replacement of ‘cultural’ by ‘creative’ industries in1998 by the United Kingdom’s New Labour govern-ment seemed initially a merely terminological and tacti-cal manoeuvre, it soon proved more complicated. It hasresulted in a lot of confused taxonomies, mangled defi-nitions, and constant slippage between cultural andcreative. In general it might be said that for some the ter-minological shift designated real developments in the‘cultural industries’ (including digitalization, increasedemphasis on intellectual property rights (IPR) and theproliferation of social media), whether positive or nega-tive. For others it was a shift within the policy fieldin which government (frequently characterized as ‘neo-liberal’) attempted to use ‘culture’ to deliver on a rangeof economic and social objectives previously seen assecondary to its purpose.

To avoid the either/or of ‘empiricist’ or ‘ideologi-cal’ accounts of the creative industries (O’CONNOR,2011a), the ‘cultural economy’ approach – concernedto understand how ‘the economy’ is culturally con-structed – might prove more productive (CALLON,1998; MITCHELL, 2008; GROSSBERG, 2010;GIBSON, 2011). In arguing that the economic objectis constructed as ‘economic’ by research and policy dis-courses this approach does not suggest a mere percep-tual or linguistic construction. These discourses workthrough a range of institutional apparatuses to assemblepeople and things within specific relations and tech-nologies framed and mutually understood as ‘econ-omic’. By implication this process of ‘assemblage’requires intermediaries who work to connect theseinstitutional discourses with the interests and contextsof the specific actors whose behaviours are to be modi-fied. The work of intermediaries is made clearer if oneuses Bob Jessop’s notion of ‘economic imaginaries’which:

identify, privilege, and seek to stabilize some economicactivities from the totality of economic relations and trans-form them into objects of observation, calculation andgovernance.

(JESSOP, 2005, p. 145)

Intermediaries actively work within these ‘economicimaginaries’ and help circumscribe a set of activitieswhich can then become the objective correlate ofpolicy intervention and measurement.

Bas van Heur and Doreen Jakob in the Introductionto this special issue on ‘Intermediaries and the CreativeEconomy’ locate contemporary intermediaries within:

post-regulationist discussions on cultural politicaleconomy […] that highlight the constitutive role of econ-omic imaginaries (such as ‘the creative economy’) inshaping the direction of economic development.

(VAN HEUR and JAKOB, 2013)

Drawing explicitly on Jessop’s notion of economic ima-ginary, intermediaries here are conceived as those who‘shape and regulate’, ‘organize and govern’ the creativeeconomy. They negotiate ‘power struggles’ and ‘ten-sions’ around ‘contradictory or resistant elements thatcannot be incorporated in particular economic imagin-aries’, and they ‘link actors from different fields butactively transform the knowledge that is being trans-ferred’ (VAN HEUR and JAKOB, 2013). That is, onehas to do with the intermediaries of a particular policyproject, an ‘economic imaginary’, who have alreadybegun to shape, organize and regulate a designatedeconomic space laid open to various forms of ‘obser-vation, calculation and governance’.

Whilst this approach has generated some good insight(cf. GRODASH, 2011; INDERGAARD, 2009), it fails togive full justice to how this particular ‘creativeeconomy’ imaginary had to be carved out not onlyfrom other economic activities, but also from a spaceof ‘culture’ that had traditionally been set against orapart from the ‘economy’. The attempt to constructthe creative economy as a regime of ‘observation, calcu-lation and governance’ was undertaken on highly con-tested territory. That is, the ‘tensions’ and ‘powerstruggles’, the ‘contradictory and resistant elements’involved in the implementation and governance of thecreative economy relate to the contested nature of thisimaginary as uniquely or primarily economic.

Jessop’s use of ‘imaginary’ is very much a correctiveto the terminologies of ‘technologies’ and ‘assemblages’so often used in actor network and cultural economytheory. Whilst actor–network theory has been con-cerned to avoid ideology critique (cf. LATOUR, 2004),this can sometimes come at the expense of giving fullweight to the overarching narratives around whichcertain projects are brought into being. Jessop andStijn Oosterlynck use the notion of ‘semiosis’ in con-junction with ‘imaginary’, arguing that:

given the contradictions, dilemmas, indeterminacy, andoverall improbability of capitalist reproduction, especiallyduring its recurrent crises, what role does semiosis play inconstruing, constructing, and temporarily stabilizing capi-talist social formations at least within specific spatio-tem-poral fixes and their zones of relative stability even as itdisplaces and defers conflicts, contradictions, and crisis-tendencies elsewhere and/or into the future?

(JESSOP and OOSTERLYNCK, 2008, p. 1156)

They use the impersonal or evolutionary systemslanguage of ‘variation, selection and retention’(p. 1155). But in order to understand the affective invol-vement of actors in that ‘imaginary’ which they activelyseek to bring into being, one might use John-PaulSartre’s notion of the ‘project’ here – the intentionaltransformation of the ‘pratico-inert’ into a coherentmeaningful system for us (SARTRE, 2004). For Jessopand others working in cultural economy, the

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designation of what is and is not economic is a highlypolitical act. Neo-liberalism, concerned to establishand sustain the conditions for a competitive freemarket, is political in a direct sense that it set out toestablish these conditions via a project of the state. Butthe project-oriented imaginary is also an exhortation –this is how it could or should be – and as such it is ulti-mately a political project as to how the world, thisspecific world, should be organized. Imaginaries aregenerative of affect with potential to elicit high levelsof personal investment. Finally, the economic imaginaryas political project will have crucial moments or turningpoints, where one imaginary might replace or margina-lize another. One might call these ‘conjunctures’(GROSSBERG, 2010).

This paper is concerned primarily with the imaginaryof the ‘cultural industries’ and the cultural intermediariesassociated with it. Primarily focused on the UK itattempts to distinguish between this and the subsequent‘creative industries’ conjuncture as involving two dis-tinct political projects. It is argued that both are notonly concerned with privileging certain kinds of econ-omic activities amongst others, but also at the sametime reframing what it is to be ‘cultural’ and what it isto be ‘economic’. It is suggested that whilst both ima-ginaries gained their energy from a claim about thechanging relations between culture and economy, theformer was concerned with the culturalization ofthe economy and the latter with the utilization ofculture as economic resource. In making this contrastthe aim is to do two things. First, to give a wider histori-cal dimension to the debate around creative industrieswhich tends to focus on the new and emergentat the expense of continuities and ‘long waves’(HESMONDHALGH, 2007). Second, to provide a correc-tive to cultural economic geographers such as AllenScott who have tended to portray local imaginariesand indeed place-based semiosis (though he does notuse that term) as inputs into local ‘cognitive–culturaleconomies’ (SCOTT, 2007). It is suggested here thatthese imaginaries are also projects for the transformationof place and the lives that it sustains.

In this contrast of conjunctural imaginaries, a histori-cal trajectory in which the second moment simply sup-plants the first is not suggested; the creative industriesimaginary required many of the actors, practices and dis-courses associated with that of the cultural industries as acondition of its own implementation. The early sangui-nity around ‘creative industry’ can in part be explainedby its adoption of many of the implicit and explicit cul-tural industries’ criticisms of the short-sightedness andone-dimensionality of rational choice, cost–benefitneo-classical economics. Indeed, part of New Labour’sappeal was its acknowledgement of, and ready collabor-ation with, those cultural capacities, practices, actors andinstitutions previously deemed marginal to mainstreameconomic analysis (exemplified perhaps by its courtingof music industry figures). It is for this reason that the

primacy of the economic in the creative industriesimaginary (culture as economic resource) remains provi-sional and contested amongst intermediaries (and onecan include academics and policy consultants withinthis group). Many state and non-state intermediaries inthe cultural sector openly present themselves as just tac-ticians and pragmatists concerned less with theimplementation of the creative industries agenda thanits détournement to cultural ends (cf. GRODASH, 2011,and INDERGAARD, 2009, for examples of this in theUnited States; and O’CONNOR and GU, 2010, forManchester, UK).

But this cannot be seen as just a response to forcemajeure – ‘it’s what we must say to tap into governmentfunding, we don’t really believe in it.’ Beyond pragma-tism there is a set of shared assumptions about the chan-ging relationship between culture and economy, acomplicity between the cultural and creative industries,which needs yet to be addressed. This paper tries to raisesome of the questions that need to be asked if one is tostep productively beyond the circle. It focuses mostly onthe UK, though many of the developments which aredescribed can be found in North America, Australiaand certain parts of the European mainland. The UKwas where both the cultural and creative industriespolicy agendas were primarily formulated; but itwould be unwise to think that these issues are merelyan island concern.

CHANGE LIFE!: NEW CULTURALINTERMEDIARIES

Contemporary discussions around intermediaries cannotfail but remind one of previous debates in the 1980saround what were called ‘new cultural intermediaries’.The term ‘cultural intermediaries’ initially derivedfrom Pierre Bourdieu’s discussion of the ‘new petty-bourgeoisie’ that had emerged in post-1968 Franceand which:

comes into its own in all the occupations involving presen-tation and representation (sales, marketing, advertising,public relations, fashion, decoration and so forth) and[…] all the institutions providing symbolic goods and ser-vices […] and in cultural production and organizationwhich have expanded considerably in recent years.

(BOURDIEU, 1984, p. 359)

As David Hesmondhalgh points out, this new petty-bourgeoisie was subsequently conflated with a smallfraction of this class, the ‘new cultural intermediaries’:

the most typical of whom are the producers of culturalprogrammes on TV [television] and radio or the criticsof ‘quality’ newspapers and magazines and all the writer-journalists and journalist-writers.

(BOURDIEU, 1984, p. 325)

Whilst HESMONDHALGH (2007, p. 66) wants to separ-ate these two categories, it was perhaps inevitable that

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they would be conflated by those who seized on theterm as a way of specifying particular agents involvedin the wider cultural changes associated with‘postmodernism’.

Bourdieu is rather disparaging of the expansion of a‘middle brow’ media sphere reporting on artistic andintellectual matters for the layperson browsing theSunday supplements, just as he dismisses their attemptto subvert or loosen cultural hierarchies through thedestabilization of boundaries of legitimate and popularculture (BENNETT, 2011).However, for those concernedto develop a ‘sociology of postmodernism’, exemplifiedperhaps by Mike Featherstone (FEATHERSTONE, 1991)and Scott Lash and John Urry (LASH and URRY, 1994),these new cultural intermediaries were more than justcritics and producers of cultural programmes in a newexpanded media; they were a broader group providingan ever-growing range of ‘symbolic goods and services’and included (following Bourdieu) the ‘helping pro-fessions (social workers, marriage councilors, sex thera-pists, dieticians, play leaders etc.)’ (FEATHERSTONE,1991, p. 44). They were concerned to validate, to‘create an audience […] for new symbolic goods andexperiences, for the intellectual and artistic way of life’(p. 45), or as BOURDIEU (1984) wrote:

make available to almost everyone the distinctive poses, thedistinctive games and other signs of inner riches previouslyreserved for intellectuals.

(p. 371)

The category of cultural intermediaries was usedboth to highlight a set of social transformations and atthe same time to give sociological precision to genericclaims for a postmodern society. Four linked themescan be identified. First, cultural intermediaries wereassociated with the challenge to cultural hierarchies;their mixing of high and popular cultures, though dis-missed by Bourdieu, was taken much more seriouslyby many in cultural studies. If high and popularculture were categories constructed by (mostly urban)elites in the nineteenth century (cf. DI MAGGIO,1982), then for an early phase of cultural studies this dis-ruption of boundaries was intrinsically anti-elitist.

It was, however, a second aspect of the new culturalintermediaries that interested the sociologists of postmo-dernism discussed here. For these the dissemination ofthe ‘intellectual’ or ‘artistic’ way of life suggested anew attitude to the self previously associated with bohe-mian and modernist circles. This new class or class frac-tion were fascinated by:

identity, presentation, appearance […] and the endlessquest for new experiences’ and represented an ‘increasingsensitivity to aesthetics, style, lifestyle, the stylization oflife, and emotional exploration.

(FEATHERSTONE, 1991, p. 44)

The adoption and popularization of the ‘artistic’ or‘intellectual’ way of life pointed not to ‘mass culture’,

but to new ways of consuming highly differentiatedgoods and services. These were symbolic goods andservices demanding that one make stylistic or aestheticchoices. The grounds of these aesthetic choices wereno longer to be ‘read off’ from a fixed social position –even that of one’s superiors. It was to be generated bythe self, but a new self concerned to realize its potentialthrough exploration and learning, through new kindsof expressivity, new kinds of emotional risks, newattitudes to the life course and the social spaces throughwhich this might pass.

This popularization of the ‘artistic lifestyle’was, third,not just a destabilization of cultural hierarchies but also adisembedding of identity from class-based (and evennation-based) ‘common cultures’. For Lash and Urrypostmodern society is no longer organized around thefixed space–time coordinates of the modern industrialnation-state. Following Ulrich Beck and AnthonyGiddens they conceive individuals as faced with prolif-erating choices demanding increased ‘reflexivity’. Thegrounds of judgment are no longer supplied by theimmediate social structures to which one ‘belongs’ butrather by ‘distanciated’ information or ‘expert systems’.However, whereas for Beck and Giddens these ‘expertsystems’ were informational or scientific-rational, forLash and Urry this disembedded self is increasinglybased on ‘aesthetic reflexivity’. That is, these subjectsmade judgements not based on universals of reasonor morality, but on sensory or indeed ‘figurative’(LASH, 1990, ch. 7) information in a process thatFEATHERSTONE (1991) described as ‘the aesthetisationof everyday life’.

The ‘new cultural intermediaries’ were those whopopularized those themes and practices that had theirantecedents in the bohemian and avant-garde modernistcircles of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,with their demands to end the separation of ‘art’ and‘life’. Thus, on the one hand, they did not simply vali-date popular culture in the face of legitimate culture,but in many ways interpreted this popular culture inmodernist aesthetic terms (O’CONNOR, 2011b). Onthe other hand, they also drew on what BOLTANSKI

and CHIAPELLO (2005) called the ‘artistic critique ofcapitalism’. Rather than the workers’ movement’sconcern with equitable material distribution, this cri-tique called into question the alienations of work andlife under capitalism and looked to instantiate thevalues of an aesthetic realm that had traditionallyopposed free creation to the instrumental rationality ofcapitalism and bureaucratic administration (ArthurRimbaud’s changer la vie).

The fourth aspect of new cultural intermediaries con-cerned their employment within an expanding sphere ofculture. Their employment prospects derived from thespecific expertise in the kinds of aesthetic knowledgerequired to navigate these new fields of cultural pro-duction and consumption, and as they ‘rapidly circulateinformation between formerly sealed off areas of

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culture’ they benefit from ‘the emergence of new com-munication channels under conditions of intensifiedcompetition’ (FEATHERSTONE, 1991, p. 10). As ‘con-veyers of culture, elaborating and re-elaborating mean-ings for the public at large’ (BOVONE, 1990, p. 81) theyfound employment through new and fluid kinds ofcareer openings:

Their educational backgrounds means that they are similar[…] to the categories of intellectuals, or sometimes (in thecase of advertising workers, fashion designers, architectsetc.) to artists […] it could be said that the professions ofthe cultural intermediaries are an innovative outlet for allthose who […] cannot make a living, as an artist or intel-lectual in the pure sense of the term. [… T]he educationcurriculum of the ‘artist’ or ‘intellectual’ in post-industrialsociety inevitably makes them into employees or, perhaps,free-lance professionals.

(p. 81)

These new career possibilities opened up in an expandedfield of education, commercial media and new metro-politan cultures. These careers demanded a new kindof self, able to occupy and negotiate these new spacesof ‘freelance professional’ culture. This was not a ‘com-mercialization’ of culture, as in Bourdieu, for it broughtwith it many of the ‘artistic’ or ‘bohemian’ demands andaspirations associated with ‘restricted’ (that is, avant-garde or modernist) culture. In occupying and negotiat-ing these new career positions the cultural intermedi-aries also brought a set of ‘artistic’ or cultural values tothe (urban) economies they had begun to create.

The potential was clearly there for cultural interme-diaries to present themselves in terms of a democratiza-tion of culture through both an opening up of the rigidhierarchies of culture to embrace the different codes andpossibilities of popular culture, and the expansion ofaccess to cultural production and consumption. Butto the extent that these cultural intermediaries promotedthe possibility of a new ‘aesthetic’ self and way of life,then they could also be seen to carry not only thepromise of a more democratic culture, but also a ‘cultur-alized economy’ in which, perhaps, a new ‘form-of-life’(FOUCAULT, 2005), derived from the ‘artistic critique ofcapitalism’, might be developed. This was a powerfulemancipatory promise, especially when coupled with anew vision for the post-industrial city.

POST-FORDISM AND THEPOST-INDUSTRIAL CITY

How such a conjunction might come about might beseen in the work of Lash and Urry in which the adop-tion and promotion of the ‘artistic or intellectual wayof life’ had important economic consequences. Post-industrial economies were pervaded by flows of infor-mation and communication processed by new kinds ofreflexive subjects; for Lash and Urry, as has beenshown, both the content of these flows and the

capacities of the processing subjects increasinglyinvolved aesthetic components. In a new regime of‘reflexive accumulation’ cultural capital became econ-omic capital in a much more literal sense than thoughtby Bourdieu: it formed a direct input into a new kindof post-Fordist production. One has therefore not justan ‘aesthetisisation of everyday life’ but a ‘societalizationof culture’, which is:

the principle […] of an ever-more information intensiveindustrial production [… where] manufacturing is […]increasingly information (hence culture-) intensive.

(LASH and URRY, 1994, p. 143)

Thus, it was also a ‘culturalization of the economy’. Thecultural industries moved from a remnant of a pre-Fordist handicraft or artisanal production to becomecutting edge:

It is not that commodity manufacture provides the tem-plate, and culture follows, but that the culture industriesthemselves have provided the template.

(LASH and URRY, 1994, p. 123)

The figure of the cultural intermediary stood at theintersection of both the political and the economicaspects of the cultural industries agenda as it emergedat local city level. The classic case here was theGreater London Council (GLC) in 1980–1986(BIANCHINI, 1987; O’CONNOR, 2009). It adoptedthe discourse of a ‘cultural’ rather than an ‘arts’ policy,embraced new forms of popular culture, new gender,ethnic and sexual identities, and took a positive viewof small-scale cultural (and indeed social) enterpriseswhose operation within the market had previouslyexcluded them from the field of ‘art’. In this sense thecultural intermediary intersected a new left cultural poli-tics. As Kate Oakley summarized:

the 1970s was a period when, across Western Europe,urban cultural polices became both more politicised andmore important. Linked to a whole range of post-1968social movements – environmentalism, feminism, gayand ethnic minority activism – leftist urban governmentssought to develop policies that moved away from the tra-ditional arms length arts polices, in favour of a more con-sciously politicised stance. In so doing, the emphasis alsomoved, from a traditional ‘high arts’ argument, based onnotions of market failure, to take on board aspects ofpopular culture, particularly those associated with ‘alterna-tive’ culture, fanzines, independent film makers, radicalpublishers and so on.

(OAKLEY, 2013, p. 207)

At the same time the GLC also saw this sector as produ-cing local employment and business growth that couldbe enhanced by a range of economic developmenttools not previously associated with the subsidy-ledarts development approach. The GLC cultural industriesmodel was often reduced to this latter economic devel-opment aspect – which in reality was rather tentative –but the cultural and economic policies hung together.

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Support for a dynamic local cultural industries sector wasnot just about economic growth but also about a moredemocratic, participatory, diverse cultural policy, andboth were wrapped up in a new vision for the post-industrial city.1 For though the economic contributionof both the arts and cultural industries became ofgrowing concern to local authorities in the UK fromthe late 1980s – soon to be picked up in other citiesin Europe, North America and Australasia – the largerimplication was that it was only via the cultural capacityof the city to produce ‘reflexive subjects’ that suchemployment effects could be achieved.

The figure of the new cultural intermediary was apivotal agent in this project of local transformation.Embodying the aesthetically reflexive self, able towork within the new ‘freelance professional’ culturalindustries, they were made possible by the post-indus-trial city and actively engaged in its transformation intheir image. If cultural intermediaries provided for asociological specification of ‘post-modernity’ then thepost-industrial city allowed its geographical precision.Laura Bovone, Featherstone and Lash were concernedto make clear that these claims for the new culturalintermediaries as bearers of a ‘postmodern culture’were concentrated in particular areas of the post-indus-trial cities of Europe and North America, cities that hadbecome privileged sites for these postmodern cultures ofproduction and consumption.

FEATHERSTONE’s (1991) oft-cited chapter ‘CityCultures and Postmodern Lifestyles’ is a thoughtful,nuanced account linking the emergent sites of urbanhedonism, spectacle, liminality and experimentationto an older avant-garde bohemian milieu. This retrievalof the connections between modernism and the city inthe context of an emergent post-industrial urbanculture can be found in JONATHAN RABAN’s SoftCity (1974) – cited by David Harvey (HARVEY,1989) as a key indicator of the shift to the postmodern.Drawing heavily on the urban sociology of GeorgSimmel and Walter Benjamin, Raban brings out thefragmentation, alienation and theatricality of urbanlife in which modernism revelled. At the same timehe suggests that as industrial production gives way toservices and consumption, these urban qualities andaccompanying sensibilities, previously isolated in bohe-mian enclaves, had now moved centre stage. He bothidentifies areas of the city (mostly London) transformedby these new bohemian ‘lifestyle cultures’ and a newurban industrial process, a ‘pure bedsitter-entrepre-neurialism’ supplying ‘a demand for commoditieswhose sole feature is their expressiveness of taste’. Hecontinued:

The stylistic entrepreneurs who make their living out ofthis curious trade go, along with gangsters and dandies,into the bracket of people possessed of a special kind ofcity knowledge.

(RABAN, 1974, p. 102)2

The dense overload of information, symbols and socialinteractions in the city –which in Simmel and Benjamin(and indeed in Raban) represented a radical disruptionof experience, to which modernism was a highlyfraught response – becomes a vital resource for a newurban cultural economy:

[T]he rapid, ever-changing circulation of informationthrough the social and economic networks of the city,and the intensity and variety of human contact […ensure an] ever present tendency to destabilisation of pre-vailing norms and practices and a certain propensity fornew insights and new ways of proceeding to arise.

(SCOTT, 2001, p. 13)

Cultural intermediaries operated within the intersticesof the new urban economy where they drew on andpromoted resources of aesthetic knowledge – ‘a style,a look, a sound’ – that were locally embedded andtacit, allowing them to ‘negotiate a new accommo-dation with global markets’ (LEADBEATER andOAKLEY, 1999, p. 14). At the same time cultural inter-mediaries transformed parts of the city into zones wherethe production and reproduction of the new selves andskills required to process flows of global aestheticknowledge could take place – what Richard Lloyd(LLOYD, 2006) later called ‘neo-bohemia’. Thesedense informational and aesthetic networks of the city,and the symbolic landscape with which they resonate,allowed urban and regional geographers to link thesenew urban cultures to locational theories concernedwith ‘untraded externalities’ and ‘co-dependencies’ –exemplified by the work of Scott. Described in thelanguage of economic geography, cities represent:

collectivities of human activity and interest that continu-ally create streams of public goods – both as a matter ofconscious policy and as unintended outcomes of socialand economic interaction – that sustain the workings ofthe creative field.

(SCOTT, 2001, p. 13)

The present author wants to suggest, first, that the cul-tural industries moment was one in which cultural inter-mediaries asserted that the ‘streams of public goods’created by their social and economic interactionsshould be promoted as a matter of conscious policy.That is, cultural intermediaries became increasinglyengaged with economic development and urbanpolicy agendas as a way of creating a context in whichthey could prosper. However, second, this engagementcame with a powerful imaginary in which culture andeconomy would be combined in new ways thatwould transform the city.

How and in what ways different cities did or did notengage with the cultural industries agenda is of course amatter for specific investigation. It can be suggested ingeneral that cultural intermediaries became moreengaged first with an expanded cultural policy, thengradually with the economic and planning agendas.

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It might be noted here how the investment in artsand cultural infrastructure, which began to growrapidly from the mid-1980s, and which was exempli-fied in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, could oftenstand as a surrogate for a cultural industries strategy.Nevertheless, the growing engagement betweeneconomic development, planning and cultural depart-ments – grandes projets-led or otherwise – involved amuch wider range of local cultural intermediariesthan had previously been the case under art-centredpolicies.

This can be seen in the ‘creative city’ agenda thatemerged out of the ‘cultural planning’ approach ofthe early 1990s (BIANCHINI, 1993; LANDRY andBIANCHINI, 1995). Here all aspects of urban life,from transport infrastructures to arts policy, were tobe equally involved in the production of a holisticvision for the contemporary city. Cultural planning’sreinvention of urbanity around a central position forculture – which might be seen as a progressive engage-ment of the urban political movements of the 1970swith local planning authorities – suggested an imbrica-tion of culture with social and economic life. This wasnot the reduction of culture to economics (or indeed tothe social); the centrality of culture was predicated bothon the increasing economic importance of culture andthe concomitant transformation of what that ‘econ-omic’ could be. The cultural industries were thuspivotal for the cultural planning approach to the city.The new cultural intermediaries actively asserted theimportance of the cultural economy and their rolewithin it. They demanded an urban milieu thatwould reflect and enhance this role, and bringto bear the values of culture on these new localeconomies.

The cultural industries imaginary thus went beyond‘economic impact’ and ‘iconic buildings’; it involvedan aspiration towards a transformation of the self andthe city in which it might find a site for these new‘forms-of-life’ (FOUCAULT, 2005). First, it challengedthe Fordist divisions between leisure and consumptionand productive labour, as well as the urban mor-phologies and built forms associated with this separation.New kinds of urban leisure and consumption, closelylinked to production sites, were essential to the accumu-lation of the aesthetic capacities required to produce‘sign value’ in the cultural economy. This wasalso a challenge to traditional notions of work (‘labourperformed for remuneration’) to include pleasureand self-fulfilment and to undermine the fixed opposi-tions of work and leisure ‘beyond the 9 to 5’(O’CONNOR and WYNNE, 1996). Indeed, thecentrality of ‘sign value’ uncoupled from utilitarian‘need’ disrupted the rational choice model of neo-classical Homo economicus generally (as well as KarlMarx’s use/exchange value binary) and suggested a

‘post-materialist’ economy in which cultural valuewould move centre stage.

For central to the cultural intermediaries’ adoption ofthe artistic or intellectual way of life was the claim thattheir labour was (relatively) autonomous and thusexemplary. As part of an expanded sphere of ‘culturallabour’ they drew on Friedrich Schiller’s artistic free cre-ation – self-determination of work and of self. In thissense they shared the theme with the post-1968 urbansocial movements and the ‘artistic critique of capitalism’associated with new white-collar workers: ‘deciding foryourself on what and with whom and when you wantto work’ (RAUNIG, 2011, p. 101). At the same timethese claims drew on long-standing cultural critiquesof capitalism and industrial society: that culture set alimit to a purely utilitarian, instrumental profit-orientedeconomy (WILLIAMS, 1958; MULHERN, 2000;OSBORNE, 2006). Now, however, such culture rep-resented a source of meanings and values that couldactively transform the nature of that economy as wellas securing continued growth in the post-industrial age.

This aspiration can be seen best in the positivere-evaluation of the market within cultural industriesdiscourse. This did not simply undo the stigmatizationof ‘commercial culture’ but attempted to re-embedmarkets in specific socio-cultural and indeed economiclocales (cf. ZUKIN, 1991). This was a theme found inpost-Communist and ‘alternative’ development strat-egies, just as itwas of economists (POLANYI, 1957), histor-ians (BRAUDEL, 1985), and later cultural economytheorists. For those cultural intermediaries engaged withlocal development policy the market was not an abstractprocess of commodification and profit maximizationbut a complex embedded field of cultural exchange andaccumulation. The cultural economy, much morethan the globalizing and (from the perspective ofde-industrializing cities) disappearing manufacturingeconomy, represented not just an economic opportunitybut a socio-cultural one – to reinstate the values of thelocal within a global economy and to assert the values ofculture against a purely economic–instrumental agenda.

It was a new urban imaginary in which the rigiditiesof Fordism would open up to new forms of culturalconsumption and production articulated with a prolifer-ation of different identities and ways of life. The culturalindustries were part of a new economic imaginary, butone in which this economy has been ‘culturalized’.This would be the basis for a new kind of culturaleconomy in which neo-classical economics and standardplanning models would have to engage with a range ofagents, interests, capacities and values it had previouslydeemed marginal. The ‘suits’ no longer quite ‘got it’.More than a democratic disruption of high andpopular cultural boundaries it was a question of whereexactly the future of post-industrial economy might lieand who was going to own it.

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FROM CULTURAL INTERMEDIARIES TOTHE CREATIVE CLASS

Where are the cultural intermediaries now and are theythe same as ‘intermediaries in the creative economy’? Tosome extent this is an empirical question. There aremany consultancies and policy advocates; arts adminis-trators; cultural/creative industry officers in an array ofsubsector development agencies; freelance project man-agers; urban planners and designers; and arts, culturaland ‘creative agencies’ in the public and private sectorsand so on, who were connected with the previous ‘cul-tural industries’ moment and which continue topromote its agenda.

Indeed, at the urban level the creative industriesagenda was initially seen as an unproblematic continu-ation of the cultural industries – possibly with a digitalupdating – and the growing involvement of non-cultural agencies a sign that the cultural industriesmoment had succeeded in gaining real traction. Thiswas certainly the case in the UK, where an influentialnetwork of academics, consultants and policy-makers –the Forum of Creative Industries (FOCI) – was set upprecisely to give expert advice to different national gov-ernment agencies on how best the agenda could beimplemented at local and regional levels (PRINCE,2010). In the specific UK context of a left-leaning gov-ernment coming to power after eighteen years of stri-dently right-wing rule, its embrace of popular culture;small-scale cultural entrepreneurship; democraticaccess to, and expansion of, arts and cultural institutions;culture-led urban regeneration; and the energies of thenew ‘digital revolution’ was nothing less than exhilarat-ing. This enthusiasm could also be found in other Euro-pean, Australian and North American cities, where itsvigorous promotion by a highly popular (initially)social democratic national government served stronglyto legitimate cultural intermediaries in their dealingwith urban policy agenda around the creative industries.

It is suggested here, however, that the creative indus-tries agenda became differentiated as it was perceived toforeground ‘business development’. The increasingemphasis on economic deliverables at the expense ofsome of its earlier claims to cultural and social inclusionhas been well documented (HESMONDHALGH

and PRATT, 2005; BANKS and O’CONNOR, 2009;TURNER, 2011; OAKLEY, 2011). The creative indus-tries, when not accused of conceptual confusion andbanalization (‘what is not creative in this definition?’),were thus associated with ‘neo-liberalism’. For manythey aimed at a reduction of the (relative) autonomyof culture to the logic of the market – albeit a newdynamic global market in which ownership of intellec-tual property rights is a major source of corporateincome. In short, though the enhanced profile of thecreative industries could be a sign that culture wasbeing taken seriously, it also came with the threat thatit would slip out of the control of the cultural sector

itself. As the creative industry agenda accelerated in par-ticular areas of Europe (mostly Northern and Eastern),North America and Australia, and was embraced by agrowing number of non-Western countries and inter-national agencies, it became clear that its appeal was asa driver of economic growth and that it was economicagencies which must be charged with its pursuit.

The ‘economic imaginary’ of the creative industrieswas contested by those who asserted its wider culturaland social agenda. As a consequence there were manystrategies of ‘expediency’ (YUDICE, 2003) and détourne-ment in which cultural goals were sought under the smo-kescreen of economic development. Debates aboutimpact studies and measurement – the specification of‘culture’ in forms that made it amenable to ‘observation,calculation and governance’ – involve a complexmixture of scepticism and pragmatism (‘if you wantthe money this is what you must do’). It recallsZIZEK’s (1989) account of ‘cynical realism’: oneknows very well that what one does is nonsense, butone does it anyway. Is this a return to the comfy antag-onism of culture and economics – and ‘creative indus-tries’ a new form of lip service to the treasury thathands out the funds?

In order to understand this one needs to look to thealternative ‘economic imaginary’ that was launched atthe same time as that of the cultural industries: theneo-liberal agenda associated with Prime MinisterMargaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan.FEATHERSTONE (1991, p. 36) saw this as a reassertionof an older ‘petty-bourgeois’ world view and an attackon artists and intellectuals in the name of ‘Victorianvalues’. This was certainly a widespread view andaccounted for the popular welcome accorded NewLabour’s cultural policy noted above. But ‘Victorianvalues’ underestimates the profound modernizing ten-dencies of the neo-liberal agenda just as it does theability of this agenda (including that of New Labour)to accommodate many of the claims for the culturaleconomy. More recently, Chris Bilton suggested thatthe GLC’s ‘social democratic arts policies’ and supportfor ‘cultural enterprise’ were part of a:

paradoxical alliance between left-wing local authoritiesand right-wing central government – which laid the foun-dations for Britain’s influential creative industries policiesmore than 10 years later.

(BILTON, 2010, p. 257)

This also equates the left with culture and the right withenterprise in a way that fails to account for how thesewere explicitly combined by the GLC at local leveland how neo-liberal national governments were ableto integrate cultural discourses within their own econ-omic agenda.

There is no doubt that the neo-liberal agenda ofThatcher and Reagan was within a (neo-)conservativeframework; in particular, it targeted the leftism of the

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‘sixties’ and its disruptive social, cultural and politicalvalues. Thatcher’s attack on the ‘chattering classes’,Reagan and George Bush Senior’s ‘culture wars’, JohnHoward’s dismissal of the Australian new left’s ‘blackarmband’ view of history – these all suggested animplacable antagonism towards post-sixties progressiveculture. But in this light it was easy to misrecognizethe radically interventionist agenda of neo-liberalismand the deeper transformations of culture with whichit was able to find a powerful accord.

The author wants to give a (rather schematic)account of this progressive implication of the culturalintermediaries in the neo-liberal programme throughfour ‘facets’.

The first facet concerns the emancipatory nature ofthe expanded sphere of culture associated with culturalintermediaries. The ‘cultural omnivore’ thesis, that thedisruption of the boundaries of high and popularculture could give rise to new forms of cultural distinc-tion, in which a facility with both high and popularculture became an advantage, has put a question marknext to the easy assumption that this expansion wasintrinsically more democratic (cf. BENNETT et al.,2009). Indeed, the challenge to cultural hierarchies,initially threatening to conservatives, was quicklyrecouped into the claims for a ‘democratic’ freemarket in cultural goods (though this is still notwithout its moral conservative–liberal contradictions)suitable to the big cultural industries. Indeed, this freemarket for culture could underpin the cultural populistposition that any claims for the (relative) autonomy ofculture were elitist (FRITH, 1991; MCGUIGAN, 1992).In addition, a flurry of articles in the late 1990s suggestedthese new cultural intermediaries were involved in‘gatekeeping’ practices which needed some attention.Keith Negus denied the necessarily innovative, ‘pro-gressive’ or democratizing function of cultural interme-diaries (also NIXON, 1997):

We need to work out when, how and under what con-ditions such aesthetic activity might be creative, innovativeand providing any more than an impetus inclining towardsthe conservative and mundane [… and] a need for a greatersense of when and how the routines, habits and codes arebroken or maintained; by who, in what ways and withwhat consequences.

(NEGUS, 2002, pp. 510–511)

In short, it was no longer possible to see ‘popularculture’ or the cultural intermediaries involved in itsproduction as intrinsically ‘progressive’. In addition, asa burgeoning literature now shows, the claims thatemployment in this sector was more democratic andcould provide career paths for ‘socially excluded’groups have been shown to be greatly exaggerated(OAKLEY, 2013). For example, the media industrieswere described by the UK government’s own skillsand training agency as ‘white, male, young and highlyqualified’ (SKILLSET, 2011, p. 31).

Thus, the second facet relates to the cliché that thepost-materialist or countercultural values associatedwith the new forms of niched aesthetic goods and ser-vices of the symbolic economy have proved increasinglycompatible with mainstream business culture. THOMAS

FRANK’s The Conquest of Cool (1997) registered a widerrecognition that the challenge of the counterculture hadbeen fully met and absorbed by the advertising industry.Not only that but the ‘artistic and intellectual’ lifestyleproved compatible with the sorts of exclusionaryhedonism prefigured in the 1980s ‘Yuppie’. However,this needs to be explained in more detail if one is notto lapse into the cynicism of everybody eventually‘selling out to the man’.

The trajectory of the new cultural intermediaries canbe read in parallel to that of the ‘new middle class’widely discussed in the 1970s and 1980s (GOULDNER,1979; LASH, 1990; FEATHERSTONE, 1991; FROW,1995). This class associated with scientific, technicaland intellectual labour was set to become the new man-agerial elite, and its concern with professional skills andethics rather than profit suggested for many that itwould tend towards social democracy. The work ofRichard Sennett (SENNETT, 2006, 2008) has shownhow these have been amongst the casualties of neo-liberalism. The present discussion of the new culturalintermediaries shows how these might be seen as thecultural ‘fraction’ or ‘aspect’ of this new middle class (alink made explicit by Featherstone, Lash and others).What is interesting then is how this ‘cultural fraction’reappears in the late 1990s as the reincarnation of thenew class, in the guise of the ‘Bourgeois-Bohemians’(BROOKS, 2000) and the ‘creative class’ (FLORIDA,2002). Both authors make claims for the centrality of anew, highly educated culturally inflected middle classthat was set to become either a new ruling class and/or the economic motor of the creative age. Thesewere amongst the prime movers of the creativeindustries imaginary. However, as both authorsmake clear, though true to their countercultural, multi-cultural roots, the new creative classes had clearlyuncoupled themselves from the ‘traditional left’, thatis, the old working-class movement. This chimes withBOLTANSKI and CHIAPELLO’s (2005) account of theuncoupling of the ‘artistic’ from the ‘social’ critique ofcapitalism, as senior management separated demandsfor increased autonomy by technical workers fromdemands for increased wages from the semi- andunskilled workers.3 The new cultural spirit of capitalismwas an explicit repudiation of the traditional left assurpassé.

The third facet relates to a shift in power. UnlikeBoltanski and Chiapello’s, Brooks’s, and Florida’saccounts of the realignment of cultural intermediariesaway from both workers’ and new social movementsfail to register (other than in the vague shadow cast ontheir project by ‘conservatives’) that their rise topower had come through an alliance with the new,

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more powerful financial and managerial elite thatreasserted itself under neo-liberalism. Gerard Dumeniland Dominique Levy (DUMENIL and LEVY, 2011)have systematically documented how neo-liberalismwas both an assault on 1960s’ managerialism (the basisof the ‘new middle class’ argument) and an adaptionof it. This adaption involved uncoupling the highermanagerial class from its alliance with Keynesian socialdemocracy and ensuring their subservience to, or athigher levels absorption into, a new deregulated globalfinancial elite.

This can be applied to the cultural intermediaries and‘creative class’. Despite the hype concerning the powerof creativity in the new economy, the claims of culturalintermediaries or creative class to centrality in this post-industrial economy were easily sidelined. For the realparadox of the 1980s was that parallel to the culturalindustries moment, with its emphasis on localized, cul-turally embedded small business economies, the globalinformation and communication infrastructure wasbeing expanded and restructured by large corporateagents. The communications and computing sectorsrapidly moved from infrastructure to ‘content’. Theyforged new alliances with media corporations as theeconomic promise of convergence saw them makehuge inroads into the public broadcasting sectors ofthe developed and less developed world in the nameof ‘de-regulation’ (HESMONDHALGH, 2007). Thismovement of global finance capital into the sphere ofculture was a direct challenge to the pretentions of thenew cultural intermediaries. As Nicholas Garnhamwrote in a critique of Bourdieu:

[T]he dominant fraction [of the dominant class] cannotsafely leave the cultural field to be shaped by the interstatusgroup competition between subsets of the dominated frac-tion, since the reproduction of their economic capital nowdepends directly upon both the costs of production and thesize of the markets for symbolic goods.

(GARNHAM, 1993, p. 189)

This had implications for the autonomy of culturalworkers that had long been one of their defining charac-teristics (CAVES, 2000; HESMONDHALGH, 2007) aspublic and private cultural sectors alike witnessed anincreased managerialism, self-exploitation and routini-zation of ‘creative’ work (ROSS, 2003; BANKS, 2007;OAKLEY, 2009). This echoes the wider process of inse-curity and erosion of autonomy amongst other skilledmiddle professional workers outlined by SENNETT

(2006, 2008). It accompanies a collapse from the pre-vious (perhaps hubristic) moment in which the auton-omy of cultural labour was exemplary of a wideremancipatory promise to its exploited membersseeking protection from the rigours of ‘precarity’(GILL and PRATT, 2008).

This process of marginalization and insecurity isreflected at the urban level in the ever more extensivepromotion of leisure and consumption linked to arts

and cultural developments which nevertheless increas-ingly excluded cultural workers as major actors orindeed as city centre residents. Scott’s account of thebenign relation between the culturized urban landscapeand cultural producers still retains a faint echo of (whathas now become) the utopian associations of the culturaleconomy noted in the second section. Describing themutual feedback between the cultural capacity of its citi-zens and the historical and symbolic values embedded inits built form, he suggests that when:

the landscape develops in this manner, whether as a resultof public or private initiative, significant portions of thecity (though rarely, if ever, all portions) start to functionas an ecology of commodified symbolic cultural pro-duction and consumption […] in which, in contrast tothe classic industrial metropolis, the functions of leisureand work seem to be converging in some sort of (histori-cally specific) social equilibrium.

(SCOTT, 2001, p. 17)

The ‘rarely, if ever’ is an understatement given theincreasing dominance of real estate interests in culture-led development and the socially divisive consequencesof this urban strategy now amply documented –and belatedly recognized by SCOTT (2007) himself. Inthe re-landscaping of UK cities surveyed by OwenHatherley (HATHERLEY, 2010) the uncoupling ofculture-led regeneration from any wider social planningconcerns is obvious. These underscore the increasingmarginalization of ‘cultural intermediaries’ within the‘creative city’ by real estate and large economic develop-ment concerns (MILES and PADDISON, 2005; EVANS,2009). It is clear that cities globally are investingheavily in the promotion of arts, culture and creativityas part of their global future. However, these are fre-quently done with minimal reference to anybody whomight be considered a ‘cultural intermediary’ andbased on a cultural capital to be immediately cashableas economic value.

The fourth facet then concerns the capacities associ-ated with creativity. Though they remain almostentirely derivative of the claims for art and culture,they are certainly not the monopoly of ‘artists and intel-lectuals’ – and nor are they that of the ‘new culturalintermediaries’. The process whereby creativity extri-cated itself from the claims of art and culture tobecome a generalizable capacity or resource (cf.O’CONNOR, 2011a) cannot be outlined here indetail. The second section showed how Lash and Urryhad suggested that ‘culture’ under post-Fordism foldedinto the economy. Though this culture was being pri-marily used in an anthropological sense of a generalizedsystem of meanings and practices (or way of life), inpost-modern times this culture is heavily mediated byinformational flows and hence highly ‘reflexive’. It hasbeen shown how expertise over these increasingly ‘aes-thetic’ aspects of these flows was a key claim for the cul-tural intermediaries. If for conservatives the acceleration

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and fragmentation associated with these new culturalflows could mean a destruction of tradition, for a neo-liberalism predicated on an interventionist programmefor the construction of ‘free markets’ and fully auton-omous, rational economic agencies, culture as reflexivecreativity became a key lever of change. How this couldbe so has been a key concern of the creative industriesimaginary. Creativity, it was argued, would be thenew transformative force for economies, and liberatingfor individuals at the same time.

It does not need to be repeated here how critics ofthis programme have argued that creativity was ameans of enhancing the capacities of individualsthrough self-monitoring, through the injunction that‘everyone be creative’ (MCROBBIE, 2011; OAKLEY,2011). It was a form of ‘biopolitics’ that establishednew codes of performativity for the (creative) self(YUDICE, 2003). One of the main ways this has beenestablished has been through the aspirations to auton-omy of ‘cultural workers’, resulting in a ‘precarity’ thatwas largely self-chosen (RAUNIG, 2011; LOREY, 2006;LAZZARATO, 2006). What is key here is that thecapacity of creativity could now be generated withoutnecessarily using cultural workers; creativity for econ-omic innovation and competitiveness was increasinglygeneric. As OAKLEY (2013) argued, the terminologicalshift from ‘creative industries’ to ‘creative economy’ indi-cates a growing awareness by government agencies thatthis general mobilization does not necessarily have torestrict itself to the creative sector – those subsectors initiallydesignated by government as creative industries – but canpervade economy and society more generally (cf. POTTS,2011). In this context cultural intermediaries not onlymay be irrelevant – this is the age of social media! – butalso, in their attachment to purely ‘cultural’ forms, maybe even be an obstacle.

CONCLUSION: STEPPING OUT OF THECIRCLE

What has been of concern in this paper is the way inwhich the cultural industries imaginary was both mar-ginalized by, and provided the preconditions for, thatof the creative industries. At the same time this storyhas been told via the investment of ‘new cultural inter-mediaries’ in this cultural industries project. This invest-ment was both professional – they were experts in theexpansion of the symbolic economy – and personal –their careers were a highly reflexive construction ofself, or ‘forms of life’. Indeed, this merging of workand life, career and self was part of the emancipatorypromise of the cultural industries in which culture andeconomy would no longer stand opposed but mutuallyinform one another.

Cultural economists talk of ‘framing’, the processwhereby a set of activities can be designated as economicand analysed and acted upon as such, ‘disentangled’ from

wider social considerations. The ‘frame’ is constantlybeing revised as these wider social considerations cometo be inserted within it – usually through political orlegal pressure (cf. CALLON, 1998). This paper has triedto describe one of these ‘imaginaries’ which dealt withan accelerated blurring of the lines between two‘spheres’ – culture and economy – which were histori-cally separated out or ‘dis-embedded’ at the onset ofWestern modernity (GROSSBERG, 2010). This imagin-ary envisaged a new kind of relationship betweenculture and economy and as such did not so muchexpand the framing of ‘economic’ this way or that somuch as demand a rethink of the very process offraming. In this sense the cultural industries agendaanticipated work in cultural economy and culturaleconomic geography, albeit with a much more explicitpolitical purpose. In the cultural industries this wasintended to realize the ‘emancipatory promise’ ofculture – the human values embodied by culturewould now be incorporated into the new post-industrial‘culturalized’ economy. In the creative industries theframe of ‘economy’ is stabilized again, if somewhatexpanded; it was the capacities associated with culturalcreativity which were now to be utilized as a resourcefor innovation-led economic growth.

This stabilization of the frame has led to an affectivedisinvestment from the creative industries imaginary. Itrarely elicits enthusiasm as a political project, even inthose non-Western countries (East Asia and Africaespecially) where its turn-of-the-century challenge toolder notions of culture briefly revived its transformativecharge. Intermediaries in the creative economy are nowincreasingly institution-based. They are in designatedcreative industries offices, usually located in economicdevelopment sections of local authorities. They comefrom academics and managers in higher and further edu-cation who increasingly see the vocational implicationsof the creative economy as prime justification for thecontemporary role of arts and humanities (TURNER,2011) and as a source of ‘industry linkage’ in the formof incubators, training and other (paid for) services tothe sector. They come from national educational, skillsand training agencies. They are promoted by arts andcultural agencies as an economic and social addition totheir cultural development remit. They are promotedby international agencies and their consultants are con-cerned to add a new dimension to ‘development’. In factas a general capacity to be encouraged across the popu-lation as a whole, ‘creativity’ is to be promoted by allpublic agencies and its unique association with art andartists (the ‘individual genius’ transformed withindecades from divine monster to autistic deviant) a preju-dice to be overcome.

This paper suggested above a complicity between thecultural and creative industry imaginaries. Certainly thelatter has adapted and repurposed many of the themes ofthe former; the one made the other possible. But the tiesbetween the two lie deeper. The complicity lies in the

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belief that the promise of culture was to be realized by anew economic order that would of itself transform theboundaries between culture and economy in emancipa-tory ways. In identifying themselves with this neweconomy there was a strong tendency to consign theold economy, and the old politics that went with it,to the past. It was the artistic critiques’ version of thatdialectic materialism satirized by BENJAMIN (1973) inhis image of the automaton – they need do nothingbecause history was on their side. In seeing the expan-sion of their new cultural field (flows of aestheticgood and services), and the transformation of the post-Fordist city within which they operated, as inevitablethey ignored the set of real political and economicdecisions and processes which underpinned these trans-formations. They regretted as inevitable what was in facta process of political choice – the destruction of manu-facturing, the traditional working class and the welfarestate.

The new cultural left that invested its hopes in cul-tural industries and urban regeneration, and which didarticulate real emancipatory promise, has since becomethe grumpy intermediary for a creative industries ‘ima-ginary’ in which it does not believe but cannot exit. Itstill believes that if the powers that be could only ‘getit’ then the cultural promise they carry could be reacti-vated once more. In an ironic return to the trap set byBourdieu from which they (thought) they hadescaped, this rising class fraction has now stalled and isperhaps sinking. In this predicament the classic choiceof the petty-bourgeoisie makes a surprise return – reac-tion, ressentiment or radical change.

NOTES

1. It was possible to see this new sector as simply a replace-ment for older manufacturing industries. To some extentthis was the approach of Birmingham City Council andthe more famous example of Sheffield’s CulturalIndustries Quarter (CIQ). Set up in 1988 as a site for theincubation of this new industrial sector, this is still citedin consultancy reports on cultural and creative quarters(MONTGOMERY, 2007). But even though the CIQ wasmore or less isolated geographically from the decayingurban fabric around it, and politically from the tourism,leisure, shopping and events approach of the CityCouncil proper, there was always the sense that this newindustrial sector would be part of a wider reinvention ofthe city and its citizens.

2. Sharon Zukin (ZUKIN, 1982, 1991) brought these newurban economies of signs and space to light during thesame period, where ‘loft living’ became a synecdoche forthe ‘artistic lifestyle’. The transformation of SoHo (andother areas of New York) was wrought by groups ofartists and cultural entrepreneurs who, though the termis not used, were clearly related to Bourdieu’s new culturalintermediaries.

3. Scott Lash had already envisaged this in the late 1980s:

[The new middle class] identities can be fixed, rigid,status-conscious on the caricatured model of theYuppie – that is, on the model of ‘distinction’. Onthe other hand these same social groupings also formin large part a constituency for the new social move-ments. Their identities or habituses can thus be con-structed […] along lines of difference rather than ofinvidious distinction.

(LASH, 1990, pp. 22–23)

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