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New Labour is Non-Labour

by Andrew Calcutt

From Labour to Culture: Andrew Calcutt correlates the new emphasis on culture with the demise of organised labour.

Twenty-one years ago I was in Coventry editing a community arts magazine with the somewhat pedestrian title The Coventry Magazine, and the strapline ‘this place is ours; this space is yours’.

As editor, I tried to persuade the local council to develop what would now be called a ‘cultural policy’, not only because the aforesaid policy might have included funding for my paper but also because at the time I felt that a policy of sponsoring self-expression and cultural experimentation among local people might generate a sense of community in a city feeling the atomising effects of deindustrialisation.

But when I and a few others went to Coventry Labour council and asked for financial backing for the magazine, and for a bigger community arts project involving the refurbishment of a derelict cinema, what we got was incomprehension. We might have been sitting round the same table but there was remarkably little communication between my generation of post-1968 culture-oriented activists, and the earlier generation of trade union-oriented activists who ran the council and the city.

Not that their Labourism had been established from time immemorial (my maternal grandfather was one of the first such city councillors in the 1920s), but when it came to our project they might as well have been Neanderthal: they just didn’t get it.

So my experience at this time was very much in line with the absence of cultural policy as documented and criticised by Ken Worpole and Geoff Mulgan in their book, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning: from arts to industry, new forms of cultural policy – a book which was highly innovative in that it constituted a cogent demand for the development of cultural policy in the labour movement.

In his introduction to their book, the (then) shadow minister for the arts Norman Buchan noted ‘the fear of using the word culture’ in labour movement circles. In today’s New Labour circles, by contrast, if you were minded to reach for your gun every time you heard the word ‘culture’ used, you’d very soon run out of ammunition. Nowadays there’s hardly a speech or a policy that does not mention ‘culture’ or ‘creativity’ and preferably both. The corollary is that there’s hardly a mention of unions except as something we’re no longer close to.

Given the readiness to describe anything that anyone does more than once as ‘culture’, and to dignify the very slightest innovation with the term ‘creativity’, given the very ubiquity of these terms in the influential circles of today, it is tempting to dismiss them as empty signifiers – mere rhetorical flourishes which are almost entirely devoid of content.

But this would be ill-considered. First, we should consider whether such widespread usage of ‘culture’ and ‘creativity’ is derived from a general turn on the part of the economy towards ‘creativity’ in the production of ‘culture’; or, whether the ‘cultural turn’ in public discourse has been prompted by other factors. These are the considerations at the heart of my recent research.

When I went in search of Creative Britain - this being the term which encompasses the proposition that economy and nation have been re-made in the image of cultural production - I found myself searching in vain. I went all round the regions looking for the home of Creative Britain, only to discover that, even now, all roads lead back to London.

There was nowhere else on the map where the concentration of cultural production was such that it played a substantial role in the local economy. But even in London, the contribution of culture to ‘value-added’ was clearly outweighed by that of financial services and supporting business services.

Like it or not, the City drives the city of London and also the national economy. Government figures suggest that during the decade 1992-2002, the contribution of cultural production (‘the creative sector’) to gross national product was £80billion out of a total of £330billion: by no means the defining component of either the economy or the nation. So the suggestion that the ubiquity of references to culture and creativity is prompted by the re-orientation of the national economy towards cultural production and ‘the creative sector’ is not borne out by the figures – nowhere near.

Thus to locate the origins of the turn to culture in public discourse, we’ll have to look elsewhere; and I’m going to look for these origins at various levels of conjecture about the conjuncture.

At the individual level, among thousands of young individuals who aspire to make something of their lives, there is a willingness to organise their aspiration and ambition around ideas of ‘creativity’ and ‘creative professionalism’. For this cohort, the desire to be recognised as a creative professional is very important, as is the idea of work as a ‘creative’ and thereby non-alienating, transcendent activity in which individuals express their individuality and get paid for it.

Equally important is the notion of creative work as a shared activity which as such transcends the sense of being an atomised individual. So ‘creativity’ comes to be the organising principle in the lives of a substantial cohort of young people.

At the level of the company, it is well-documented that advertising yourself as a ‘creative company’ can help to expand your market share, although it does not necessarily enlarge the market itself. But there’s more to it than that. ‘Culture’ and ‘creativity’ are now asked to play an increasing role in human resources management, so that the extent to which a company can convince employees that it is a ‘creative’ organisation is key to the conviction it can carry on the conduct of management-worker relations, and hence to the very conduct of those relations.

In a context where union-management relations are of so much less significance than before, more companies are replacing labour politics with identity politics, whereby employees as well as consumers are encouraged to identify with the company as the bearer of shared values and meanings. In respect of consumers this is widely referred to and generally recognised as ‘branding’. With regard to employees a similar emphasis on ‘culture’ and ‘creativity’ is known as ‘internal branding’. Thus there has been a considerable re-organisation of corporate life around cultural priorities.

Similar priorities and dynamics are discernible in local and national government - the state. Among a governing class which is painfully aware of its disconnection from the wider population, cultural policy is now an important part of the attempt to re-connect, to implement ‘social inclusion’ in the broad sense of the term.

Whether cultural policy is an effective means of reconnecting government and people remains to be seen; but the internal effects of the cultural turn are already discernible in the clustering of state functions and the younger generation of state functionaries around cultural priorities: they are connecting with each other through culture even if the effectiveness of cultural policy in making wider connections, remains moot.

Moreover, when almost any public service you can think of has been ‘outsourced’ or is in the process of being so, in the midst of so much dispersal, cultural policies and priorities are playing a central role in what’s left of the public sector. Increasingly, the management of culture is what public bodies are for.

In political life, as elsewhere in society, there is a division and a contradiction between on the one hand the organisation of activity around the principle of measuring it (the sovereignty of audit), and on the other hand the cult of creativity where only that which is largely immeasurable – creativity – is accorded the highest status.

Ironically, while management yearns for ‘creativity’ and tries to redefine itself as creative, ‘creativity’ not only has to be managed – apparently – but its implementation is increasingly measured in audits of ‘best-value’ and the like. This is the bind we find ourselves in, and which itself both confirms the desire for ‘creativity’ as a refuge from audit and endorses the resort to audit as a kind of insurance in case ‘creativity’ really is an empty signifier.

Thus the turn to culture (and its counterpart, the out-of-control control-freakery of audit) has its roots in the demise of the old ways of living out social relations and the need to find new ways of connecting ourselves and justifying ourselves. This is to say that the cultural turn has been made chiefly because of the demise of organised labour as the primary means of mediating the conflicts inherent in British society.

With the turn to the cultural mediation of society, it is as if Matthew Arnold’s dream has come true except in a multicultural form rather than the monocultural mode in which he envisaged it. For Arnold, the turn to culture was a defence against anarchy. Today, the turn to culture is an attempt to deal with anomie. By comparison, the much-vaunted increase in cultural production hardly comes into it.

Andrew Calcutt lectures in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East London

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