Entrevista realizada por Rodrigo Gómez García en Leeds (Reino Unido) el 28 de junio de 2010. Texto transcrito por Argelia Muñoz. Disponible en inglés.
RG – What do you think about the actual state of critical analysis of the media and culture and particularly within the Political Economy of Communication and Culture?
DH – I think that the political economy is in some trouble as an analytical term. I think that in Britain at least many of the major figures who developed that tradition are now rather retired or approaching retirement, that perhaps make less of a contribution to media and communication or culture studies debates than they used to. And then in the United States the political economy tradition has been dominated by a form of analysis that many people feel is insufficiently engage with a rigorous social and political theory and so in the transatlantic round, in the Anglophone world at least, I think that political economy in many ways has gone backwards. I can’t speak for what is happening in Latin America or Asia so much. I do think there is still a lot of work, good work happening in Asia, in Europe, in North America, perhaps in Latin America too, that shows the influence of the political economy tradition. But whether that’s been renewed, it’s a different matter. What we seen now is the rise of media production studies, sometimes it is called media industries studies, is taking up of questions of production and industry in cultural studies – where of course traditionally cultural studies had little interest in questions of production-. So you get writers like John Caldwel from UCLA writing a really interesting book about production cultures from a perspective that is not exactly hostile to political economy but sidesteps it and there is a number of people working in that tradition. So, yeah I would say political economy is in some difficulty, but still has important things to say. Another thing to mention is that for me one of the best writers working in what you might call the political economy tradition that very really seemed to of used that concept was Edwin Baker and he died recently, a very sad lost. And I think in some ways Ed Baker represented in the USA the most well developed version of political economy thinking, but tragically he died in an accident.
RG – In that particular view what do you think about the task of Political Economy of Communication and Culture to assert the total sociality? And if you think that the media and Cultural Studies have been giving inputs to think social theory?
DH – On the second question, I think that unfortunately there’s a really limited degree into which media studies has influenced social theory or cultural studies has affected social theory, since the 1980’s works of Stuart Hall really. Maybe you can see in the more recent work of Manuel Castelles -that work in a communication school, that´s an interesting development- but in some ways his magnum opus The Information Age trilogy was before he really encountered communication media theory seriously. So you do get people working in media studies who were very adept with social political cultural theory. People like Nick Couldry, John Durham Peters, I would name Jason Toynbee –who is engage in critical realism- but whether that represents a dialogue with social theory, whether the social theory and political theory people are listening to media studies and cultural studies is another matter, I don’t think they are. So there’s a real problem.
RG – So do you think that the Media Studies and Cultural Studies in front of Sociology and Anthropology are still in an immature state or underage?
DH – I don’t think that that’s the problem. I think is less the case of immaturity, well I think that the problem may come from the other disciplines that are supposedly more mature. It may be a problem of perception. Actually I think there are really important things that social theory needs to learn about media studies and cultural studies about “mediation”, about specificity of culture. I guess for me the work of Raymond Williams is still absolutely vital in understanding the relations between culture and society. So what went wrong? Maybe the moment passed when cultural studies was fashionable, where identity theory in the hands of people like Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, and certain kind of feminist theory were fashionable, sexy. More recently I’ve noticed that if anything has that kind of sexiness and fashionability is autonomist marxism where you see the influence of the European idealist philosophy maybe transmuted through people like Gilles Deleuze. And that perhaps is now the place where cultural studies and social theory meet. Perhaps something like autonomist Marxism, but I think that a lot of it is something like amateur philosophy, and amateur politics…That´s my own perspective anyway.
RG – In the Latin American academic perspective, in that way for some moments we think that the problem is about power relations. No every single faculty dean in any university became for our fields. Could it be related in this area to this kind of things?
DH – Of what? You thought that there was an attempt to keep out cultural studies and media studies on defense, on the part of traditional disciplines?
RG – Yes.
DH – Yeah. Could be. Or perhaps many of the people involved in cultural and media studies are ambivalent about gaining power and prefer to operate from the margins, which is an understandable impulse, especially in an era of the neoliberalization of universities. But I know we have to be careful not to generalize too much because there are different sections of the media studies, cultural studies, communication studies -in Britain and in the United States- where you do see a certain amount of capture of institutional power. And because there’s a lot of hardwork in Britain by figures like Peter Golding and Christine Geraghty an all these media studies and communication studies do have a certain institutional space and certain respectability. Which I refuse to see as a sell out as abdication of its politics, I think it is much more complicated than that. I think that without that institutional space, the enterprise will not thrive; it will be in danger of collapse. But there is certainly ambivalence about power on the part of many of us working in critical media and cultural studies.
RG – If we walk a little backwards and we talked about political economy and cultural studies, we know that the traditions became from the same root. In fact we can see that its fathers are Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, we could say that in Britain particularly. Or as Mattelart says, they are the two little brothers that are always fighting each other. Do you think that they are enough mature in methodologically and theoretically speaking terms, to finally reestablish the path to have their concepts, methods and analysis to understand our contemporary societies.
DH – I think the best work often combines traditions that had been treated separated so I think there are very good researches, writers who draw upon political economy but also draw upon cultural studies -I named some of them earlier there’s a long list of them. And then you can see all the ways in which various researchers that are not sectarian and maybe combined other influences that might be understood as in conflict. I think there is much more serious attention to class, alongside gender or ethnicity in many cases now. There is no longer the sense that to examine the ground of economy or markets is in itself a politically regressive mood which was a part of a certain rhetoric when I started studying the media in the late 80’s and the early 90’s. That seems to have been mostly left behind and thank goodness! Maybe there is still some hostility from some quarters of the old left towards notions of identity and certain theoretical ideas that might actually open up some spaces for new types of thinking. So there is no easy solution. I don’t think these things will be thrown back together, put back together again. Some final results of a certain trajectory in the field but the best research will always be open to combinations where possible but suspicious of reconciliation is just superficial rather than properly theorized and from the roots up. But for me in political theory figures such as Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth -in their debate- show the vital importance of combining questions of subjectivity with questions of social power and those are important lessons, I think for our field to learn from. I think that a lot of mediocre research really doesn’t have any engagement with what you may call the politics of subjectivity that come out of the best sociological, social theory and political theory.
RG – For example: Is because at the same time in both sides -if you allow me to say that-, use Bourdieu but in a different way or in a different text; it depends on the view that one of those traditions want to assert. But we are talking about the same guy that used those concepts in the same direction…Or in the late eighties, Giddens was used to… –the first Giddens, with the agency estructuration theory-, so both sides or both traditions used the sociological approach, even anthropological approaches too… Raymond Williams of course.
DH – Yes. Just taking Bourdieu it is true that both cultural studies and the political economy are other sections of the field depending on how you divided all, have been able to appropriate Bourdieu, different parts of Bourdieu. I think that the debates over neoliberalism become quite important, don’t they? In the 1990’s Bourdieu begins to take quite strong political positions that perhaps by then it becomes appropriated more livingly by political economy and a certain type of cultural studies begins to be suspicious of a certain rallying tone in Bourdieu’s work. And I can see why some versions of cultural studies are suspicious of a certain set of rhetorical tropes that attempts to provide too pure an answer to the problem of politics. And so you get a lot of foucauldians, people as Carl Schmitt, to get at the complexity. So Bourdieu has always actually been a very contested figure, even though you are absolutely right that he has at many different times been claimed by many different factions. I think that he is an incredibly important writer, I don’t think he is a pleasurable writer to read, that’s all, but I think that the triumvirate habitus-field-capital has a value. And I don’t want to use it too crudely or too strongly in my own work but when you are reading social and cultural analysts with an insufficient understanding of power is always Bourdieu that I want to refer people to first.
RG – If we go a little further and if we talk about one of the principal objects of study as well as a concept of the political economy of communication and culture, we have to make a stop about cultural industries, because they are a cornerstone to understand our societies, well I think so and the political economy thought so too. In that sense what do you think of the position that says that all industries are cultural industries? And in the same view they say that the cultural industries concept doesn’t have epistemological ground, what do you think about this?
DH – I’ve never seen a convincing version about that argument. Every version of that argument that I’ve seen seems to me to be fatuous, it seems to me that there is an extremely robust and intelligent explanation in most of the important literature on the cultural industries that it is quite clear about the specificity of culture. And the question I want to ask to these people that say that all industries are equally cultural… the question is: A banker is the same as musicians? Is it an accounting spread sheet the same thing as a novel?
RG – An automobiles are the same as soap operas?
DH – Yeah. They are not! There has to be some account to the specificity of culture. Otherwise it seems to me that we abandon the value of culture and of in inverted comas “art” which value is always ambivalent of course, arts and culture are always related to hierarchies and unequal distribution of social power, I don’t deny that! But unless we hold on to the utopian core of human expression and knowledge then it seems to me that we are missing something incredible important that needs to be defended. And actually aligning ourselves with a whole type of thinking or a set of types of thinking, that attempt to eliminate those differences.
On the other hand, I would want to say that I believe that it is useful and interesting to examine cultural production and the cultural industries that´s by no means everything, that’s where I am happen to have concentrate all my energies as a researcher and teacher but only as part of the division of labor. I’ve always thought that there were many many others aspects of media communication and cultural studies that are equally important and of course sometimes on back days I wish that I had taken a different route myself. But I think they are valuable and important things and we need good, clear, cogent analysis of cultural industries as part of power relations within modern societies.
RG – Other issue that you were working on in the last years are related with the construction of the idea of creative industries. What are your main concerns about this?
DH – I think I have two concerns. One is a concern about public policy, so if I deal with that first, the creative industries idea looks good on paper (laughs) because it provides a concept on set of discourses that potentially allow for government support, for valuable forms of activity in our lives. The problem is that, that happens as a price and the price is actually something like the autonomy of aesthetic expression and of knowledge so ultimately the creative industries idea and policy ties the valuing of creativity to an economistic discourse that sees all cultural value as ultimately subservient to monetary value and economic value. So that is one problem I have, if you like, in the world outside academia. The second problem is a problem with academic analysis that for me is to uncritical of the idea of creative industries and policy and, like creative industries policy discourse, makes assumptions about the nature of contemporary cultural change that attribute too much importance to technological shifts and doesn’t sufficiently question what’s happening with the development of social networking sites, cliques such as Web 2.0 and so long… So creative industries discourse is attached to a celebration of the new that I am always skeptical off. But an immediate qualification would be that I am not denying for one moment that things aren’t changing and that there aren’t some emancipatory possibilities within or around these new technologies but those are nearly always, completely overstated both in the creative industries policy discourse and in the academic analysis that has those connections with it.
RG – Yes, and paradoxically this idea becomes from left government, so in one way you can see that it is a public policy from the spin doctors of the new labor and it is difficult to address it, as a bad way to change things in the economic policy
DH – It makes it harder to understand it when it comes from an appropriation of the progressive discourse, I think it does any way. This is why I think that one of the most important works of sociology and social analysis in recent years is Boltaski and Chiapellos The New Spirit of Capitalism, which was published in French in 1999, translated into English in 2005. I don’t know if it has been translated into Spanish.
I think is a great book. And one of the reasons it is great –although I certainly don’t agree with all of it-, is that it really represents an attempt to get to grips with the way in which -what Boltanski and Chiapello called- the new spirit of capitalism represents an appropriation by various institutions, including management, of the progressive ideas of the counter-culture, the 1960’s counter-culture. So they talk about the way in which, in particular the so-called artistic critique of capitalism -that criticizes capitalism for its lack of authenticity in the way in which it stifles individuality, authenticity, personal expression- gets appropriate so the management and various other aspects of contemporary capitalism claim to be giving these authentic freedoms of personal expression back to work. Of course that in fact what’s happening is much more complex politically and difficult to attain.
RG – One point that was very clear that had made Phillip Schlesinger and Gaëtan Trambley is that it is difficult to criticize the creativity by itself. And more, if we are related with undergraduate students that we want to be creative.
DH – Yes absolutely.
RG – So, the problem is, that it is a good political idea, as you said, but in a theoretical way it doesn’t really work.
DH – I just written a book about creativity with my colleague Sara Baker and is about work in the cultural industries. And of course one of the things that people like to work in the cultural industries is that it seems to offer the opportunity for creativity, self-expression, self-realization and so on, and it is very important, specially perhaps when you are teaching young people that would go on to work in the cultural industries, the media industries, the creative industries –whatever you want to call them-, that we can offer a coherent critique, including of the fact that many of those people would go and work for nothing. That would lead to a situation in which a certain social class of your people will dominate the best jobs through the internship system. But at the same time I think it’s very important to remember that it doesn’t negate entirely the value of creativity, creativity in the sense of making products that are based around aesthetic and knowledge production. Fifty years ago, Raymond Williams wrote the opening chapter of his book on The Long Revolution, fifty or sixty pages called “The Creative Mind” where he already recognizes -in 1960 or 1961- the banality of the idea of creativity and the way that it could be appropriated. But he also talked about the absolute need to defend the idea of human creativity that is not something we can actually let go off. So I guess the era of creative industries and the management celebration of creativity has only intensify that appropriation by the powerful of that idea of creativity. But for me that means is simply raises the pressure on us to provide a critical defense of autonomous creativity. I do think that the concept of autonomy is a really important one. Cause again as with creativity is possible to over-deconstruct those terms because they been so associated with sloppy conservative and liberal thoughts but actually I believe the left needs critical conceptions of creativity and autonomy, and that we need to work collectively to defend spaces where autonomy and creativity are possible and to spread more evenly and widely through society those spaces and those possibilities. That seems to me to be cultural politics for the contemporary era.
RG – Very interesting. In that line and context, what is the future of cultural policies in the new British Tory panorama? Are they going further in the way of the marketization?
DH – I would be astounded if we don’t see an intensification of the commodification and marketization that we have seen over the last 30 years in Britain. I think we have to recognize that it’s been some de-commodification under labour, the policy of eliminating admissions charges for many cultural institutions. I think we have to think of that as to some kind of de-commodification. There is no doubt that the labour government put more money into the arches of culture than previously, the defending of the BBC… But they always did so with the proviso that all these institutions have to… as if they were to marketize themselves and become profit maximizing public sector institutions. So, the politics of Labour’s cultural policy were complex but in my view were linked totally to neoliberalization, which is a concept that some cultural studies people now are beginning to deny as of any analytical value at all, which suggests that the tensions between cultural studies and political economy actually remain very alive. What we see now by the conservative liberal democratic coalition in Britain is a massive assault on the public sector and on the value of public service and public knowledge. And sure we are going to see very strong attacks on the BBC, we certainly have already seen very strong attacks on education, on funding, including higher education. I would be amazed if that doesn’t happen in the ground of arts and culture policy too. I think it is going to be extremely difficult. It may be different in other countries. In the USA it may be that, not just because of Obama but because of other dynamics there might be some reversal of neoliberalization and marketization. But in Britain I can say with some confidence that the next 3 years, 4 years, 5 years are going to be brutal.
RG – Finally, from your view, What is the importance of cultural work in our days? I know that you are working on that. I know that you are going to publish a book on that topic. And what is your approach to the cultural work?
DH – As I was saying before, the creativity remains an ambivalent concept appropriated but also something that we need to hold on to the value of. In the book we attempt to understand the media industries, the cultural industries through work and labour. And it surprises me that that hasn’t really been address in a very serious way with the exception of 3 or 4 contributions. But people such as Andrew Ross, Mark Banks, Angela Mc Robbie cleared some important space for that. Part of this is about the importance of work so it’s a more general social scientific question than just cultural work, is about understanding when work is great, when it is awful, when it’s at different points in the scale between those two normative spaces. But what we are not dealing with in the book particularly is the traditional question of studies of cultural production, which is about how the organization of cultural production leads to certain textual outcomes. I think that is a really important question but we in many respects have to put that to one side just in order to think about cultural work as work. What possibilities does it offer for self-realization, for autonomy, emancipation? What kinds of conditions do people face in their work? And the truth is that although there are some very exploited conditions there is also spaces where excellence is valued and encouraged, where people can get a certain degree of freedom. Admittedly, access is limited and is organized by power but of course under present circumstances that is true of many good jobs. So I guess we are trying to provide actually a balance account of what cultural work is in modern societies that takes into account the critical analysis that has developed all the last 10 years which is very, very important and valuable. It counters the complacent celebration of cultural working in some creative industries discourse and academic analysis. But we recognize that actually there are ways in which -although work is always about struggle and difficulty, compromise and negotiation-, there are good jobs in the cultural industries.
