Cultural Policy

Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy

Contributors: By: Toby Miller & George Yúdice

Book Title: Cultural Policy
Chapter Title: "Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural Policy"
Pub. Date: 2002
Access Date: June 12, 2018
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd
City: London
Print ISBN: 9780761952411
Online ISBN: 9781446217207
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446217207.n1
Print pages: 1-34
©2002 SAGE Publications Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of
the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
SAGE SAGE Books
© 2002 Toby Miller and George Yúdice

Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural Policy

Can it be denied that the education of the common people is the most effective
means of protecting persons and property? – Lord Macaulay (quoted in Lloyd and
Thomas (1998) 18)

Culture is connected to policy in two registers: the aesthetic and the anthropological. In the
aesthetic register, artistic output emerges from creative people and is judged by aesthetic
criteria, as framed by the interests and practices of cultural criticism and history. In this world,
culture is taken as a marker of differences and similarities in taste and status within social
groups. The anthropological register, on the other hand, takes culture as a marker of how we
live our lives, the senses of place and person that make us human – neither individual nor
entirely universal, but grounded by language, religion, custom, time and space. So whereas
the aesthetic articulates differences within populations (for example, which class has the
cultural capital to appreciate high culture and which does not), the anthropological articulates
differences between populations (for example, which country sells new technology and which
does not) (Wallerstein).

Cultural policy refers to the institutional supports that channel both aesthetic creativity and
collective ways of life – a bridge between the two registers. Cultural policy is embodied in
systematic, regulatory guides to action that are adopted by organizations to achieve their
goals. In short, it is bureaucratic rather than creative or organic: organizations solicit, train,
distribute, finance, describe and reject actors and activities that go under the signs of artist or
artwork, through the implementation of policies. Governments, trade unions, colleges, social
movements, community groups, foundations and businesses, aid, fund, control, promote,
teach and evaluate creative persons; in fact, they often decide and implement the very criteria
that make possible the use of the word, ‘creative.’ This may be done through law courts that
permit erotica on the grounds that they are works of art; curricula that require students to read
plays on the grounds that they are uplifting; film commissions that sponsor scripts on the
grounds that they reflect national concerns; entrepreneurs who print symphonic program
notes justifying an unusual season on the grounds of innovation; or foundations that sponsor
the community culture of minorities on the grounds of a need to supplement (mostly white)
middle-class culture with ‘diversity’. In turn, these criteria may themselves derive, respectively,
from legal doctrine, citizenship education, tourism aims, impresarios’ profit plans or
philanthropic desires.

The second understanding of culture appears in academic anthropology and journalistic

explanations of the Zeitgeist. For instance, references to the cultures of indigenous peoples
by anthropologists before land-rights tribunals are in part determined by the rules of conduct
adopted by the state in the light of local political issues and international human-rights
discourse. Similarly, references to yuppie dot-com culture by newspaper feature writers are in
part determined by the rules of conduct adopted by their editors/proprietors in the light of
local market segmentation and international occupational norms. In effect, we hear about
these lifestyle/ritual practices because of such policies.

In addition to these highly deliberate practices, policy is often made unwittingly, through the
permeation of social space by genres that invoke ‘a particular kind of organization of audience’
that may maintain or modify ideological systems (Vološinov 96–97) on an ad hoc, inconsistent
basis. Performativity, rather than constativity, characterizes policy, and it is frequently made
‘on the run,’ in response to unpredictable pressures. In semiotic terms, both culture and policy

Page 2 of 28 SAGE Books - Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy
SAGE SAGE Books
© 2002 Toby Miller and George Yúdice

have their langue (formal, rule-driven qualities) and parole (actual usage). Just as parole
complicates langue, so there is inevitable overlap between the aesthetic and anthropological
registers in cultural policy.

Delegates to Mondiacult 1982, a world conference on cultural policy run by the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), agreed that:

culture gives man the ability to reflect upon himself. It is through culture that man
expresses himself, becomes aware of himself, recognizes his incompleteness,
questions his own achievements, seeks untiringly for new meanings and creates
works through which he transcends his limitations. (‘The Mexico’ 190)

Similarly, the Canadian Commission for UNESCO – operating in a First World context but
from a position vexed by unequal cultural transfer with its elephantine Southern neighbor –
calls for a ‘proper cultural education’ that can guarantee citizens will engage in both self-
criticism and self-appreciation, in order to produce well-rounded individuals – a combination of
maintenance and renewal through critical reflection (Canadian 81).

What are these ‘UNESCrats’ talking about, and does this axiom define the field of cultural
policy? To historicize and theorize that question, our Introduction approaches cultural policy
under seven headings: governmentality, taste, ethical incompleteness, alibis for funding,
national and supranational projects, cultural citizenship and cultural policy studies. This is a
prelude to the heart of our book: those cultural knowledges and practices that determine the
formation and governance of subjects. For as well as being a book that seeks to summarize
the current state of play in discussions of cultural policy at a very general, international level
and this is also an intervention into that knowledge that urges a particular theoretical and
political orientation. We position ourselves within the committed norms of cultural studies
rather than the objective claims of orthodox policy research. Our book seeks, in other words,
to articulate knowledge with progressive social change, with social movements as primary loci
of power, authorization, and responsibility. More conventional research articulates knowledge
with social reproduction, with governments as primary loci of power, authorization, and
responsibility. Whereas our project is concerned with transforming the social order, the
alternative seeks to replicate it – a struggle between cultural policy as a transformative versus
a functionalist sphere. Our starting points are therefore theory, history and politics, rather than
efficiency, effectiveness and description.

The Rise of Governmentality in the West

Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality is key to the actions and claims of Western
states in the cultural domain, both historically and today. Foucault uses the term to explain
‘the way in which the modern state began to worry about individuals’. An example is that even
as eighteenth-century Revolutionary France was embarking on a regime of slaughter, public-
health campaigns were also underway. This paradox was an ongoing, Janus-faced ‘game
between death and life’ that the state constructed for itself as a benevolent despot
(‘Conversation’ 4). Foucault offers a history of this emergent modern sovereignty in an ironised
mode via his use of the ‘barbarous but unavoidable neologism: governmentality’, a word
originally coined by Roland Barthes to describe variations in market prices and responses by
the state (130).

Foucault identifies a series of problems addressed at different moments in European

economic and political organization, beginning with five questions that were posed across the

Page 3 of 28 SAGE Books - Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy
SAGE SAGE Books
© 2002 Toby Miller and George Yúdice

sixteenth century: ‘How to govern oneself, how to be governed, how to govern others, by
whom the people will accept being governed, how to become the best possible governor’.
These questions emerged from two historical processes: the displacement of feudalism by the
sovereign state, and the similarly conflictual Reformation and its counters. Daily economic and
spiritual government came up for redefinition. The state emerged as a centralizing tendency
that sought to normalize itself and others. Religious authority, embroiled in ecclesiastical
conflicts, lost its legitimacy to vouchsafe the sovereign's divine right of rule. The monarch was
gradually transformed into a manager, rather than the embodiment of immanent rule
(Foucault ‘Governmentality’ 87–90).

From that moment on, governing required a double movement. The sovereign discovered how
to run his life, and treated his dominions according to these lessons. And the father learnt to
run his family like a principality and train his minions to carry their docility and industry into
the social sphere. In turn, the family's forms of life influenced conduct away from the home.
This backwards and forwards motion of public and private, of imposed and internalized norms
that shuttled between work and domesticity in search of civic peace/control, came to be
known as the ‘police’. Pedagogy extrapolated from the ruler's self–knowledge to the rule of
others, and policing transferred this motion into the head of the household and also back onto
the street (91–92). Put another way, we might see this as the economization of government, a
complex movement between self and society in search of efficiency and authority.

With the upheavals of the seventeenth century, such as the Thirty Years War and rural and
urban revolts, new modes of social organization arose. In eighteenth-century Europe, the
concept of ‘the economy’ spread beyond the domestic sphere. What had been a managerial
invention, dedicated to forming correct conduct, transformed itself into a description of the
social field. By now, the government of territory was secondary to the government of things
and the social relations between them. Government was conceived and actualized in terms of
climate, disease, industry, finance, custom and disaster – literally, a concern with life and
death and what could be calculated and managed between them. Wealth and health became
social goals, to be attained through the disposition of capacities across the population:
‘biological existence was reflected in political existence’, through the work of ‘bio-power’. Bio-
power ‘brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made
knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life’. Bodies were identified with
politics, because managing them was part of running the country. This history is still relevant
to contemporary life. For Foucault, ‘a society's “threshold of modernity” has been reached
when the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies’ (‘Governmentality’ 97,
92–95 and History 143).

The foundations of classical political economy date from around this time, and are generally
associated with a libertarian championing of the market. But as Michael J Shapiro's study of
Adam Smith has shown, the very founder of the discourse theorized sovereignty beyond the
exhibition and maintenance of loyalty – government was also required to manage ‘flows of
exchange within the social domain’ (Reading ‘Adam Smith’ 11). The physiocrats and Smith
identified a transformation in the status of the government from a basis in legitimacy to a basis
in technique, specifically the ability to distinguish ‘what is free, what has to be free, and what
has to be regulated’, notably in the areas of crime and health (Foucault ‘Problematics’ 124–
25.) Science and government combined in new environmental-legal relations, under the signs
of civic management and economic productivity So when the British Parliament required
smallpox vaccinations for all children from 1853, this was simultaneously a landmark in
medicine and in public regulation of the body politic. Two years later, Achille Guillard merged
‘political arithmetic’ and ‘political and natural observations’ to invent demography, which had

Page 4 of 28 SAGE Books - Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy
SAGE SAGE Books
© 2002 Toby Miller and George Yúdice

been on the rise since the first population inquiries in seventeenth-century Britain. The new
knowledge codified five projects: reproduction, aging, migration, public health and ecology
(Synnott 26; Fogel 312–13). Cultural policies became part of this duty of care. For instance, at
the turn of the twentieth century, the British state introduced a policy of ‘Education for All’. The
subsequent Education Act of 1902 mandated school-pupil visits to museums as part of its
curricular requirements (Coombes 124).

The critical shift here was away from an autotelic accumulation of power by the sovereign, and
towards the dispersal of power into the population via the formation of skills. The center
invested people with the capacity to produce and consume things, insisting on freedom in
some compartments of life and obedience in others (Foucault ‘Problematics’ 125.)
Governments wanted people to manufacture goods by the most rational allocation of
resources available. Hence, governmentality was other-directed and instrumental, and its
target was the whole population. At the same time, philanthropy was also developing in
Europe – the beginnings of today's third sector, inbetween the private and the public. Neither
profit-making nor state-based, it was occupied by an array of elites that were interested in
social reform, and operated beyond the immediately self-interested norms of politics, but in a
governmental mode (Donzelot 36, 55–57, 65).

The model of the household as an economic matrix continued across the first half of the
nineteenth century, despite its provincialism in an internationalizing, post-mercantilist world,
until the externalization of the state created new industries and modes of production. The new
duality – empire and economy – expanded the purview of governments beyond the sovereign
and the household. The population had displaced the prince as a site for accumulating
power, and the national economy had displaced the home as a site of social intervention and
achievement that became both international and local (Foucault ‘Governmentality’ 98–99).

Clearly, then, the emergence of modern capitalism was connected to the rise of the sovereign
state, which was concerned to deliver a docile and healthy labor force to business; but not
only to business. Cholera, sanitation, and prostitution became the business of government in
the modern era through ‘the emergence of the health and physical well-being of the
population in general as one of the essential objectives of political power’. The entire ‘social
body’ was assayed and treated for its insufficiencies. Governing people meant, most centrally
and critically, obeying the ‘imperative of health: at once the duty of each and the objective of
all’ (Foucault ‘Politics’ 277). This idea of fitness to perform expanded to include education and
hence culture.

Of course, before the emergence of governmentality, cultural policy had long been a symbolic
and a highly pragmatic topic. The uptake of English as a national language occurred after
1400, when writing in Latin and French were disavowed. This was a national language policy
at work, animated by the desires of Henry IV and V to reinforce their dubious legitimacy by
encouraging national unity in the Parliament and citizenry. And from the first days of her
empire, Queen Isabella's functionaries established Castilian as a language of conquest and
management. Indeed, Antonio de Nebrija, the imperial grammarian, wrote in his Castillian
Grammar, published in that fateful year of 1492, that ‘Language is Empire’ (11). By the mid-
fifteenth century, Italian nobles were establishing instant libraries, employing copying scribes.
This marked the advent of an industrial process for producing symbols of power. Already, we
can discern the two great wings of cultural policy flapping energetically: subvention and
training. Princely galleries of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Europe developed into places of
lavish decoration, designed to impress local and foreign visitors with the grandeur of regimes
and their scions, through decor and iconographic representations of individual rulers (Duncan

Page 5 of 28 SAGE Books - Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy
SAGE SAGE Books
© 2002 Toby Miller and George Yúdice

Civilizing 22). The doctrine of Robespierrean France in the 1790s was, in the Abbé Grégoire's
words, ‘to erase dialects and make French universal’ (quoted in ‘How Multilingual?’). In 1850,
20% of French citizens could not speak French. The full armature of a press and compulsory
education was mandated to rectify this failing. At the same time, in the immediate post-
Independence period, Latin American statesmen wagered that curricula underpinned by
grammars devised from empirical observation of New-World Spanish – in contrast to the Latin-
based grammars of Spain and Europe – would maintain national unity (Bello ‘Prologue:
Grammar’ 101–102). And at the moment of Italian reunification in 1870, Massimo d’Azeglio
commented in sponsoring language policy that ‘we have made Italy: now we must make
Italians’ (quoted in Shore ‘Transcending’ 474).

Once language is shared, other forms of cultural production follow suit – for along with
speech can come geographical representation. Imperial cultural policies varied between the
exclusion of languages (the outlook of the British and the Dutch in their colonial
‘possessions’), language assimilation (Spain under Franco, France today, the US in the
1920s, Pakistan in the 1950s and 1960s) and a pluralization of equal legitimacy for different
languages (contemporary Canada, Peru, Paraguay, Nigeria, and Austria) (Schmidt 57–63).
The struggle for making meaning continues to this day, as new (sub)national entities like the
Basque Country and Catalonia seek to standardize their own national languages as top
priorities for autonomous governments (John H Fisher, 1168, 1170, 1178; Phillipson 8; Urla
822; Bolton and Hutton; Nathaniel Berman). Croatian cultural policy goes so far as to tease
apart any remnants of Serbian that might ‘contaminate’ the new national language. And when
the Soviet Union broke up, its former republics had two choices in dealing with their sizeable
Russian-speaking minorities: either propound a cultural nationalism that marginalized the
Russian language and set religious, racial and linguistic criteria for citizenship (as per Estonia
and Latvia); or adopt a civic policy that offered entitlements based on territory, fealty, and
labor (which took place in Ukraine and Kazakhstan) (Laitin 314–17). The Estonian government
must now deal with a sizeable Russian minority, which it alienated by initially adopting a hard-
line nationalism. The government is trying to defuse the situation via Russian-language
schools and cultural groups.

The artistic corollary of these forms of linguistic governance is a project that seeks to educate
the citizenry into a set of tastes. We might say, then, that taste formation is cultural policing or
cultural policy. To engage the philosophical correlatives of this shift, we turn now to the
Western cosmology of taste, which appears at the same time as modern Western
government.

Philosophizing Taste

In his Critique of Judgement, the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant conceives of

taste as ‘conformity to law without the law’ (86). He means that aesthetic activity, if properly
monitored through education (‘examples of what has in the course of culture maintained itself
longest in esteem’ (139)), produce an effect and a ‘knowledge’ in the human subject derived
from universally valid ‘morally practical precepts’ that are independent of particular interests.
They ‘rest on the supersensible, which the concept of freedom alone makes cognizable’ (Kant
11). According to Gilles Deleuze, Kant's Critique of Judgement is tantamount to a new
‘Copernican revolution’, whereby the foundation of knowledge ‘no longer has a theological
principle, but rather, theology has a final human foundation’ (Deleuze 69). Moreover, the
presumably universal character of this foundation is, for Kant, identified with the public
sphere, which locates the social in bourgeois modernity: ‘Taste as a kind of sensus communis’

Page 6 of 28 SAGE Books - Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy
SAGE SAGE Books
© 2002 Toby Miller and George Yúdice

or ‘public sense, i.e. a critical faculty which in its reflective act takes account (a priori) of the
mode of representation of everyone else, in order … to weigh its judgement with the collective
reason of mankind’ (Kant 151).

Across a century or two of economic modernity, other, more revolutionary thinkers pick up on
the importance of this kind of identification for collective loyalty. Karl Marx writes that: ‘it is
impossible to create a moral power by paragraphs of law’. There must also be ‘organic laws
supplementing the Constitution’ – i.e. cultural policy (Eighteenth 27, 35). These organic laws
and their textual efflorescence come to represent each ‘epoch's consciousness of itself’
(Althusser 108). Antonio Gramsci theorizes this supplement as an ‘equilibrium’ between
constitutional law (‘political society’ or a ‘dictatorship or some other coercive apparatus used to
control the masses in conformity with a given type of production and economy’) and organic
law (‘civil society’ or the ‘hegemony of a social group over the entire nation exercised through
so-called private organizations such as the church, the unions, the schools, etc’) (204).

Raymond Williams applies Gramsci's concept of hegemony to culture, defining it as the

contention of dominant versus residual and emergent forms. Hegemony is secured when the
dominant culture uses education, philosophy, religion, advertising and art to make its
dominance appear normal and natural to the heterogeneous groups that constitute society.
The accomplishment of this ‘consensus’ instantiates what then appears to be an ‘ethical
state’, which deserves universal loyalty and transcends class identifications (Lloyd and
Thomas 114–18). These practices necessarily reference historical change in order to legitimize
changes of taste and power. Residual cultures comprise old meanings and practices, no
longer dominant, but still influential. Emergent cultures are either propagated by a new class
or incorporated by the dominant, as part of hegemony. These manoeuvers find expression in
what Williams terms a ‘structure of feeling’: the intangibles of an era that explain or develop
the quality of life. Such indicators often involve a contest – or at least dissonance – between
official culture and practical consciousness. Further, Williams insists on the importance of
community life, the conflicts in any cultural formation, the social nature of culture, and the
cultural nature of society.

The notion of the popular was used by Gramsci in his diagnosis of the rise of fascism in 1920s
Italy, and as part of his program for moving Italian politics in a more revolutionary direction. In
his estimation, progressive Italian intellectuals of the day were out of touch with key social
forces, particularly the ‘popular masses’. It was necessary to construct a ‘national-popular’
consciousness or ‘collective will’ amenable to revolution. Language was most important as a
means of ‘collectively attaining a single cultural “climate”’ necessary for constructing a
hegemonic project. For Gramsci, a language compelling to the popular classes (including
artistic and cinematic language) was perhaps the most strategic instrument of a bid for
hegemony, which had to reach down to the people who could bring revolutionary change. His
view was premised on the tenet that ‘all men are intellectuals’ insofar as they ‘participate in a
particular conception of the world … and therefore contribute to sustain a conception of the
world or to modify it, that is, to bring into being new modes of thought’ (Gramsci 348–349, 9).
Institutional or party intellectuals thereby transform common sense into good sense, which
then should guide the popular – cultural policy at work.

National cultural policies are, then, a privileged terrain of hegemony. They provide a means of
reconciling contending cultural identities by holding up the nation as an essence that
transcends particular interests. In keeping with the negotiated conflict that lies at the heart of
hegemony, the cultural domain produces challenges from those sectors that the contingency
of history has moved into contestatory positions. David Lloyd and Paul Thomas give the

Page 7 of 28 SAGE Books - Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy
SAGE SAGE Books
© 2002 Toby Miller and George Yúdice

example of English working-class radicals of the 1820s and 1830s who rejected cultural
criteria for citizenship and political representation (i.e. education), on the grounds that there is
a ‘close relationship between being represented. being educated and being appropriated’
(61). Other examples are rival sectors of the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie, and (more
recently) new subject positions: immigrant, anti- and postcolonialist, gender and ethnically
based, and so on. Frequently, attempts to assimilate anthropological difference are mounted
under the sign of aesthetic unity – hence the tight link between language policy and teaching
on the one hand, and literature and the audiovisual media on the other. Literature has been a
central strut of public education, as a training in both language and in norms. It embodies the
public sphere by offering public discussion of the private life of the bourgeoisie (Habermas
Structural), serving up exemplary individual lives to be emulated (or abjured) and providing a
mise-en-scène of the predicaments that face an economic class-in-the-making as it devises
forms of ethical legitimacy.

In keeping with the project of governmentality, the emergence of a philosophy of taste in the
eighteenth century displaced social authority from religion and the theocratic state, assigning
it to the social as a privileged terrain where conduct would be regulated in the modern age.
Looked at from this vantage point, we can see that the pedagogy and exercise of taste are
premised on the authority of a monitorial function, internalized within the subject through
culture. This developmentalist logic reasons that when a people's sense of taste is removed
from sensory interests, their taste will approximate purity as part of ‘a transition on that part of
our critical faculty from the enjoyment of sense to the moral feeling’ (Kant 156). Despite
disclaimers, Kant says the development of universal taste constitutes the ‘link in the chain of
the human faculties a priori upon which all legislation must depend’. Taste is not given – it
depends on cultivation through a sentimental education, premised on what Matthew Arnold
was later to recommend as a principle of social regulation.

Arnold, a nineteenth-century British poet, cultural critic and schools administrator, identified
productive goals for culture through policy, such as putting poetry onto the elementary-school
curriculum and campaigning for a national theatre (McGuigan Culture 55). For Arnold, culture
is neither autotelic nor accidental, but ‘a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not merely
or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social
passion for doing good’. By opposing Culture and Anarchy in his 1869 classic, Arnold defends
a liberal education against a purely utilitarian training for industrial production. But he does
envisage culture instrumentally, as a ‘practical benefit … [a] great help out of our present
difficulties’. Culture counters social ‘anarchy’ not only by mitigating the modern tendency to
break down traditional ways of life, but also by correcting the shortcomings of the three
classes: the Barbarians (the aristocracy), the Philistines (the middle class), and the Populace
(the working class). His notion of culture eschews the specific interests of industrial classes,
particularly the working class: ‘Culture does not try to teach down to the level of inferior
classes; it does not try to win for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and
watchwords’ (70). Instead, culture is the ‘pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to
know, on all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the
world’ (6). More specifically, culture can produce national consolidation, secured by state
institutions. Neither Philistines, nor Barbarians, nor the Populace alone may exercise the
‘authority which we are seeking as a defense against anarchy, which is right reason, ideas,
light’ (85). This authority can only be found in the ‘best self’, which gives the three classes
their unity and harmony. That self is embodied in the State, the ‘organ of … our national right
reason’ (94–97). Culture and Anarchy seeks to demonstrate how the ‘cultural values of the
modern state’ function, arguing that culture is central to authority's mission of preventing
anarchy by helping to design the modern person, the liberal individual. Arnold wants an

Page 8 of 28 SAGE Books - Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy
SAGE SAGE Books
© 2002 Toby Miller and George Yúdice

architecture for this person that can define and develop individuals who comprehend the need
for an authoritarian antisepsis to populist excess.

An aesthetic of truth and beauty is, as per Kant, the internal monitor within each person that
provides a collective, national, categorical imperative. Its very ethos of singular appreciation
becomes, ironically, a connecting chord of national harmony, binding individual goals to an
implied national unity. For Arnold, ‘culture, self, and state’ form a trinity of modernity, in the
service of enlightened authority. Elsewhere, he writes that ‘culture is reading’. This elevates
interpretation to the level of a cultural requirement for citizenship that is learned via public
education (Lambropoulos 173, 175–76, 179, 191).

Arnold had counterparts elsewhere. Domingo F Sarmiento founded public schooling in

Argentina after the motto ‘civilization or barbarism’, delineating educated Creole citizens from
indigenous-mestizo peoples. One could move between these categories, but only through the
work of a new, educational culture, rather than an inherited, analphabetic one (García
Canclini Hybrid 112). In Chile, Andrés Bello founded both the educational system and the Civil
Code with a view to producing ideal national citizens. He had been exiled in London from
1810 to 1829, where he conducted research on language, literature, and law at the British
Museum, and collaborated with British intellectuals like James Mill, whom he assisted in
editing Jeremy Bentham's papers. This earned him the suspicion of Simón Bolívar and other
revolutionary leaders who mistakenly took him to be a monarchist. While it is true that Bello
designed and implemented his liberal educational and civic projects within the conservative
context of Chile in the first half of the nineteenth century, his work was also adopted in many
other, more republican contexts. His prominence, moreover, stemmed from his role in
formulating a model of international order that echoed Kant's ‘Toward a Perpetual Peace’,
which was incorporated in the charter of the Organization of American States in the twentieth
century.

Bello charted out a double method for constructing the nationhood of Chile and the ‘emergent
nations’ of America. While he accepted the epistemological advances of European
historiography and science, he nevertheless rejected ‘excessive servility toward the science of
civilized Europe’ (Bello ‘The Craft’ 183). That is, American nations had to arrive at self-
understanding not by applying European knowledge to local circumstances, but by applying
the ‘independence of thought’ characteristic of scientific and historical methods: they must
gather data, establish facts, and arrive at a philosophy of history through ‘synthetic induction’
(Bello ‘Commentary’ 170 and ‘The Craft’ 177). This construction of the nation through a new
history relied on freedom to think for oneself, outside the prestige of European knowledge.
The journal he founded, El Repertorio Americano (1826), ‘[gavel preference to everything
related to America’ (5).1 Bello, moreover, placed little value in abstract philosophies,
‘generalizations which say little or nothing in themselves to the person who has not looked on
living nature in the paintings of history’, that is, in the sources themselves (‘The Craft’ 183).
The people best positioned to carry out this historical research, he argued, are the Americans
themselves (‘Address’ 132), not for essentialist reasons, but because the ‘sources [are]
closest to us’, and because it was a historical and political necessity for Americans to
construct nations. In the process, Bello envisioned a civilizational maturity expressed in (Latin)
America's additions to the European reservoir of knowledge (‘El Repertorio’ 6), thus bringing it
much closer to the universal history in whose name it (unilaterally) spoke. In any event, Bello
took heart in the conviction that historical certainties are also dated, and that new knowledge
continually reshapes the past and the present from which it is constructed (‘The Craft’ 184).1

Page 9 of 28 SAGE Books - Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy
SAGE SAGE Books
© 2002 Toby Miller and George Yúdice

Although he does not cite Kant, Bello derived his notion of freedom from the paradox,
elucidated by the German philosopher, that law operates as ‘the hindering of a hindrance to
freedom’ (Kant quoted in Balibar 119). He also concurred with Kant that ‘juridical constraint
morally educates individuals’, that the self-education of the people ‘proceeds from the pure
idea of the law as from an interior directive’ (Balibar 120, 127) – all the more reason to include
the law-governed template of grammar in his popular education program. For Bello, ‘the
spoken word is insufficient’. The ability to read and write becomes a qualification for
citizenship: ‘to preserve, in safety and order, the few or many affairs in which they will
engage’. Literacy is necessary for ‘the study of the Constitution [which] must form an integral
part of general education … in order to grasp the organization of the political body to which
we belong’ (‘On the Aims of Education’ 113, 115). Obviously, this was both a necessity and a
Utopian aspiration at the time that Bello wrote, for only a very small percentage of the
population in Chile could read and write (‘Report on the Progress’ 144). Nevertheless, the will
to impose literacy was symptomatic of the will to control alternative knowledges rooted in oral
cultures (Mignolo) and different ways of life resistant to governmentality

‘Standards of taste’, to use the phrase that bourgeois critic Hilton Kramer wielded in the recent
US culture wars, are part of hegemony, a key means of differentiating and stratifying society.
The value projected by aesthetic hegemony is ultimately premised on a series of exclusions,
which are clearly recognized as such by those who stand to lose out. Social harmony is
bought at the expense of those whose tastes are not only aesthetically unacceptable but,
more importantly, potentially contestatory. Thus, when artistic practices are not perceived as
contributing to the prevailing order, hegemonic actors use the law to quash them. Any person,
object or practice deemed offensive to prevailing standards of taste has no legitimate place
within the public sphere, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. argued a decade ago in defense of the US
rap group 2 Live Crew when one of their albums was banned as obscene. Gates contended
that the group's threatening cultural ethos, not obscenity per se, brought on court action
(‘Two’). Part of this ethos was a racially-inflected opposition to governmental authority and
conventional morality. Taste was an index of, and a cloak for, racial style and subjectivity.

The tasteful citizen has, therefore, never been universal in practice. The history of aesthetics
finds a feeling, sensate romantic (perhaps male?) figure who can locate and luxuriate in the
radiance of an object of beauty. This romantic soul's ‘other worldly’ take on the sublime is
transferable to his lesser co-nationals. No longer the processual quality that derives from the
specific meeting of a will and a text, transcendence detaches itself from a particular human
agent and becomes a quality of the object observed, the text. Now, the aesthetic is an object
(that text) and no longer a practice (the romantic soul and the text). As an object, it becomes
available for redisposal as a method of pedagogic formation. New people are to be formed
through the experience of being led to the aesthetic sublime in interaction with this text. This
is the moment when they are brought into the cultural fold, when the twin registers of the
anthropological and the aesthetic merge. But as the next section demonstrates, this merger is
never permitted to reach a climax. It is an ultimately unattainable desire.

Shaping and Managing Ethically Incomplete Subjects

Clearly, then, the merger of governmentality and taste finds cultural policy dedicated to
producing subjects via the formation of repeatable styles of conduct, either at the level of the
individual or the public. Jacques Donzelot brings the terms together in his concept of policing,
alluded to earlier. It describes ‘methods for developing the quality of the population and the
strength of the nation’ (6–7). For middle-class reformers in nineteenth-century Western
Europe, teaching the working class to value the nation was the best bet for avoiding industrial

Page 10 of 28 SAGE Books - Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy
SAGE SAGE Books
© 2002 Toby Miller and George Yúdice

strife and class struggle. That process began by improving urban life, and proceeded to instill
collective investment in the patrimony (Lloyd and Thomas 18). Policing was conceived as a
struggle between reason and unreason for ‘the public mind’. The irrational aspects of subjects
would be made known to them as a preliminary to their mastery of life and its drives.
Journalist Norman Angell's speech in acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize for 1935
represents policies informed by such anxieties. He calls for public education to demonstrate
the subject's ethical incompleteness to itself, so that this indeterminacy can be worked on in
the interest of social harmony: ‘First, the ordinary citizen and voter must acquire a greater
awareness of his own nature, his liability to certain follies, ever recurrent and ever disastrous’
(quoted in JDB Miller 56, 59). In other words, the way to produce well-tempered, manageable
cultural subjects who could be formed and governed through institutions and discourses was
to inscribe ethical incompleteness in two-way shifts between the subject as a singular, private
person and as a collective, public citizen that could govern itself in the interests of the polity.

Cultural policy, both elite and popular, is much concerned with the legitimate interests of the
polity. So, for example, the newly emergent and triumphant bourgeoisies of nineteenth-
century Western Europe wanted a laissez-faire ideology that favored new kinds of privilege,
based on market success. They also sought a national ideology that connected these
monetary freedoms to social control via national identification and the ethical uplift of art – a
Kantian-Arnoldian formula (McGuigan Culture 55). As monarchical systems were gradually
displaced by democracies, leaders needed legitimacy in order to tax the populace and hence
finance a standing army (Borneman and Fowler 490).

No surprise then for Jean-Jacques Rousseau to insist that ‘[I]t is not enough to say to the
citizens, be good; they must be taught to be so’ (130), or that the Preamble to the US
Constitution specifies the need ‘to form a more perfect Union’ and ‘to ensure domestic
tranquility’. Similar heads of power endorsed cultural subvention in Revolutionary France,
where the Declaration of the Rights of Man was distributed to all schools in 1793 to help
children distinguish between public and private virtues, conceptualize female citizenship, and
contemplate the rights of the child. Anxieties about the revolution's future, which were close
upon reformers by that year, generated numerous publications for young people, designed to
create a new kind of public person. Instruction in citizenship appeared in manuals, non-
religious catechisms, and alphabets. These texts established a close nexus between political
and ethical principles. The citizens of tomorrow were expected to know their Rights of Man in
the same sense – and with the same purpose – as they could recite and live out codes of
manners and lists of facts, or recognize a variety of typefaces. But unlike other manuals of
conduct, such as the variety that flourished in the nineteenth century, the revolutionary primer
addressed a reader who would constitute a new social order, not await integration into an
existing one.

Cultural policy in the Third Republic in France aimed to instantiate a republican sentiment via
drama. Where early Revolutionary theatre made the occasion of performance into the
originating text – with the canon residing in the pleasures of the populace, rather than in an
inviolable textual classicism – this was quickly displaced by a core of tracts to uplift the
citizenry, as per the aesthetic elitism described earlier. Jules Michelet used drama as an
article of education to connect people who were otherwise dissociated from one another. The
theatre was ‘le meilleur espoir de la rénovation nationale’ [the best hope for national renewal].
By the 1880s, the Ministry of the Beaux Arts encouraged the construction of ‘the people’ as a
national entity, utilizing their comparatively recent literacy and enfranchisement in a double
move of allegiance and participation that would bind them to the Third Republic, even as it
spoke to their drives for pleasure and accessibility. The same period in Britain saw an intimate

Page 11 of 28 SAGE Books - Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy
SAGE SAGE Books
© 2002 Toby Miller and George Yúdice

connection between calls for a national theatre as a conduit to public contemplation of the
state of the nation and subsequent self-improvement (Kruger).

Where eighteenth-century Europe saw the emergence of the human being as the center of
the new sciences, with the promise of new freedoms through self-knowledge, the nineteenth
century's ‘mature’ capitalism required a specialized division of person and labor in all areas of
life, with New York its center By the middle of the twentieth century, the international center of
cultural gravity had passed from Europe to the United States – or was ‘stolen’ by it (Guilbaut).
A crisis emerged between the logics of civility and management because of an overcoded
economic rationalism whose apogee was ‘technocratic centralism’, to use Julia Kristeva's
summary There seemed to be a lack of fit between the logic of developing technology and the
values it was supposed to serve. C Wright Mills introduced 1959 readers of The Listener to the
‘post-modern period’. Postmodern because freedom and reason, the joint inheritances
granted to liberalism and socialism by the Enlightenment, had ‘virtually collapsed’ before the
overweening priority given to a rationality dedicated to efficient centralization (Mills 236–37,
244).

By the time US cultural critic Christopher Lasch published The Culture of Narcissism twenty
years later, this postmodern turn sounded more like a postmortem for the American character.
Lasch attributed the turn for the worse to ‘quite specific changes in our society and culture –
from bureaucracy, the proliferation of images, therapeutic ideologies, the rationalization of the
inner life, the cult of consumption, and in the last analysis from changes in family life and
from changing patterns of socialization’ (32). Mass culture had hastened the turn away from
rational citizenship and toward a society of the spectacle's trade in images, as per emulation
of black ghetto patois and taste by ‘middle-class society’. This expressed a ‘widespread loss
of confidence in the future’, whose only palliatives were living for the present through self-
indulgence (67–68). Lasch discerned a ‘pathological narcissism’ of the ‘performing self’ in the
rise of aesthetic populism, the waning of affect, the escalation of self-consciousness
exemplified by parody and historicism, the erosion of authority, the displacement of artistically
unified work by texts comprised of differences, and above all the abolition of critical distance
(Jameson). This culture of narcissism resulted from a ‘bureaucratization of the spirit’ through
government programs that had established criteria for social service Lasch (90). People
became ‘connoisseurs of their own performance and that of others’, with the ‘whole man’
fragmented into multiple identities (93) that presaged cultural politics based on race, gender,
sexuality, and so on.

As you will see, unlike Lasch, we welcome many of these postmodern developments – not
least because we lack nostalgia for the supposed organicism of an anterior time, – which is
really code for a period when subordinated groups ‘knew their place’. Nevertheless, it has to
be acknowledged that cultural policy's synergistic complex of government programs, media
representations, and market lures, has accommodated itself to, and in the process blunted
the radical potential of, this repudiation of the well-rounded individual. Cultural policy always
implies the management of populations through suggested behavior. Normalization has
different performative forces in different times and places, variously enjoining universal
adoption of bourgeois manners or stratifying access to cultural and other material resources
on the basis of other demographic categorizations (e.g. the five pan-ethnic groupings
characteristic of the US census, media and consumer markets, and political voting blocs).
Such normalizing power sets an ideal that can never quite be attained, yet must be striven for.

The notion of ‘ethical incompleteness’ is premised on instilling a drive towards perfection (as
the best possible consumer, patriot, ideologue or Latino). The process inscribes a radical

Page 12 of 28 SAGE Books - Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy
SAGE SAGE Books
© 2002 Toby Miller and George Yúdice

indeterminacy in the subject, in the name of loyalty to a more complete entity – the nation.
Cultural policy finds, serves, and nurtures a sense of belonging, through educational and
other cultural regimens that are predicated on an insufficiency of the individual against the
benevolent historical backdrop of the sovereign state. These regimens are the means of
forming a collective public subjectivity, via what John Stuart Mill termed ‘the departments of
human interests amenable to governmental control’ (68).

Some of this is done in the name of maintaining culture, to preserve ways of being a person
or ensure governmental control over a population in terms of ethnicity, age, gender, faith, or
class – though the last two are rarely cited as justifications for state intervention. These
regimens can also manage change, often by advancing new modes of expression. Whilst
there are superficial differences between a collectivist ethos and Mill's individualistic
utilitarianism, they share the precept that ethico-aesthetic exercise is necessary for the
responsible individual (Lloyd and Thomas 121). ‘Good taste’ becomes both a sign of and a
means towards better citizenship. This ethico-aesthetic exercise also has a postmodern
version: culture is the legitimizing ground on which particular groups (e.g. African Americans,
gays and lesbians, or the hearing-impaired) can make a claim for resources and inclusion in
the national narrative, if only to decenter it (Yúdice ‘For a Practical’). They do so by calling up
the alibis used to privilege specific cultural forms on behalf of the totality of the social.

Funding Alibis

Of course, the ideas of a universal philosophy of taste and a technology of ethical

incompleteness for imposing it, still have to contend with competing social politics, even within
dominant classes. Crucially, cultural policy raises difficulties for ideologues on behalf of the
supposedly non-paternalistic state that simply allows its citizens the opportunity to determine
their own cultural wants and needs. If cultural-capitalist societies identify themselves as
sources of free expression, as evidenced in the absence of a state that seeks to direct the
work of art, what should be their governments’ stance on culture? Should they adopt one at
all? Western cultural-capitalist countries are wont to take two rhetorical positions here. The
first offers the market as a system for identifying and allocating public preferences for culture,
denying the state a role other than as a police officer patrolling the precincts of property –
deciding who owns what and how objects should be exchanged. The second identifies certain
artifacts as transcendentally laden with value, but vulnerable to the public's inability to remain
transcendental in its tastes. This latter position encourages a dirigiste role for the state, one
that appears to coerce the public into aestheticization and is routinely accused by certain
critics of ‘cultural magistracy’. Nevertheless, it would be misleading to argue that the market
and the state do not work in tandem in many situations. In some cases, cultural-capitalist and
dirigiste roles operate together, as the market is declared the proper venue for the culture
industries, while heritage, particularly that of indigenous peoples and minorities, is
administered by the state. There is also an increasing monetarization of heritage, across the
First and Third Worlds, led by governments. Heritage tourism schemes involve capitalist
enterprises, state assistance, and international financial institutional investment by agencies
such as the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and kindred organizations, in
collaboration with third-sector, non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Ronald Dworkin divides the public subvention of culture between ‘the economic and the lofty’.
The economic approach suggests that community support for culture is evidenced through
the mechanics of price. The lofty approach suggests that a command culture is necessary,
because market processes emphasize desire rather than improvement, and hence favor
pleasure over sophistication. We could name this false taste consciousness. Markets fail to

Page 13 of 28 SAGE Books - Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy
SAGE SAGE Books
© 2002 Toby Miller and George Yúdice

encourage and sustain art's function of defining and developing universal human values and
forms of expression, because popular taste is ephemeral. Of course, conventional capitalist
logic is opposed to the deployment of public funds in the service of an ethically derived set of
preferences – the contested presumption that ‘it is more worthwhile to look at a Titian on a
wall than watch a football game on television’. As most people supposedly prefer the latter – a
preference that can be quantified through preparedness to pay for the right – it is paternalistic
to force them to subsidize the former as part of their generic tax burden on the grounds that
timeless art can in fact only survive if the poloi are required to admire it. Art may, however, be
reconceived within the economic wing of this Manichean divide, as a public good that makes a
collective contribution to the aesthetico-intellectual functioning of a community, via the mutual
impact of popular and high culture. On this view, art can be subsidized so long as it
contributes to the community. Insofar as it does, it parallels popular culture's impact. And both
art and popular culture contribute, one to intellection and the other to fun. The idea is to allow
the market to gauge popular taste, and the state to ensure the continuation of elite taste and
heritage appreciation – a method of keeping unpopular history alive and at the forefront of
culture. As Gordon Graham (770) poses it: ‘Sport, though valuable, is essentially a release
and distraction. Great art is directly concerned with human experience and its ennoblement’ –
an opposition between pleasure and enlightenment. This notion of culture as fun (via the
market) and progress (via the state) is central to much cultural policy.

The contribution of the aesthetic to the collectivity can be assessed in two ways. Beatriz Sarlo
argues, as per Lasch, that in contrast to the speed and ephemerality of popular, consumerist
culture, aesthetico-cognitive culture requires slow processing and critical thinking, which are
ultimately necessary for the proper functioning of the polity. Sarlo laments the disappearance
of a serious engagement with the aesthetic dimension in recent English, US, and Australian
cultural studies. In her view, a symbolic practice's semantic density and formal complexity
endow its producers and interpreters with a critical faculty that cannot be delivered by more
popular forms of cultural expression, such as pop music, television, celebrity performance and
cyberculture. They lack the ‘excess’ which escapes the rationalization of distribution or the
logic of the commodity, a logic to which, she argues, cultural studies practitioners have
capitulated.

But if this were the case, then the US, as the epicenter of the audiovisual, would presumably
lead the way in a popular incapacity to appreciate, for example, the performing arts. But this is
not so. Consider the data comparing them with sport and cinema:

Figure 1 Admission Receipts for Performing Arts Events, Motion Pictures, and
Spectator Sports in 1996 Dollars: 1987–1998

Page 14 of 28 SAGE Books - Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy
SAGE SAGE Books
© 2002 Toby Miller and George Yúdice

So, in place of these critiques by Lasch and Sarlo, we turn here to Walter Benjamin's insight
that ‘turning points of history’ are accompanied by challenges to the optical and tactile
‘apparatus of perception’ (240). Following this reasoning, semantic density and formal
complexity do not constitute the only practices that shape cognitive faculties. New habits of
sensorial appropriation, such as those fostered by the cinema (Benjamin's example) can hone
critical faculties in an analogous manner, although not necessarily in conformity with the
cognitive skills developed in previous historical periods. There are different cognitive styles,
and they do not all rely on a high-aesthetic training. Certain styles have little to do with the
internal workings or complexity of a practice. They are more connected to interactivity (as in
theater and stadium sport) or citationality (parody, pastiche, and sampling, which were
mainstreamed in the digital age). The value of these alternatives does not ensue from density
or complexity, but from the ways in which interaction and citation are organized – part of
which, of course, also relates to the impact of the state, the market, and the media on
cognition, via education and the interpretive techniques that inform cultural policy.

Figure 2 Admission Receipts for Performing Arts Events, Motion Pictures and Spectator
Sports: 1992–1997

Dworkin charts a third way to support culture, beyond the market and culturecrats. In their
place, he proposes ‘a rich cultural structure’ to undergird the social world of both the
contemporary moment and its imagined descendants, allowing for old and new cognitive
registers. This structure is valuable not because it produces pleasures of the moment, fleeting

Page 15 of 28 SAGE Books - Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy
SAGE SAGE Books
© 2002 Toby Miller and George Yúdice

joys of fashionable accessibility, but because it generates complexity and difference; for in
difference can be found the flexibility to produce pleasure at other times and places, through
an audience protected from the ephemerality of fashion. Dworkin denies that this is an
imposition of uplift. Deflecting potential charges of paternalism, he appeals to a notion of
trusteeship. This trusteeship conserves the historically contingent (in terms of taste), in order
that currently unfashionable options for pleasure can be made available to future generations.
Diversity is supported over popularity or excellence, because it is a rubric of difference rather
than taste or value (Dworkin 221–33).

Dworkin's move submerges the loftiness of training inside a heritage-inflected economism. Yet
its exchange between excellence and difference presumes a capacity to differentiate between
structure and content, singularity and normalcy, repetition and innovation, which in itself
involves a training in distinction – cataloguing people and their preferences. As categories and
valencies are themselves historically and politically derived, these differentiations can never
be reduced to innocent technical calculation. In other words, Dworkin still presumes to know
the difference between what does and does not matter to an era. Just as the apparently
timeless horizon of truth claimed for free-market economics is bounded by a definite history,
so this attempt to broker a rapprochement between non-interference and cultural magistracy
secrets an inevitably tight connection between artistic work and social scaffolding.

Be that as it may, Dworkin's reconciliation of the ‘economic and the lofty’ references a dilemma
for cultural policy almost everywhere, as part of the need to elaborate the nation to itself. The
Australian Labor Party's 1986 policy Platform, for instance, maintained that the ‘basis of
Australian society lies to a significant extent in the strength of its own artistic and creative
expression. Government has a responsibility to encourage the development of an Australian
culture’. In 1992, as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)/Tratado del Libre
Comercio (TLC) was about to be signed into law, the Mexican government created a National
Council for Culture and the Arts (CONACULTA) to allay any fears that the Agreement might
lead to a loss of sovereignty – the director of CONACULTA arguing that ‘the solidity of our
culture is the substrate of our identity … and the bulwark of our sovereignty’ – and to
modernize Mexican society by capitalizing on the cultural diversity necessary for success in a
globalizing world (Tovary de Teresa 17, 19–20). As we shall see, these claims have been
repudiated by officials who approach cultural policy from the special relation between
localization and globalization (World Commission on Culture and Development;
Intergovernmental Conference).

A similar concern for a governmental role in fostering culture as a means of furthering a

national project is evident in the 1965 law enacting the United States’ National Endowments
for the Arts (NEA) and Humanities (NEH). The legislation states that ‘[i]t is necessary and
appropriate for the federal government to help create and sustain not only a climate
encouraging freedom of thought, imagination, and inquiry but also the material conditions
facilitating the release of this creative talent’. Looking back a quarter of a century later, a
Congressional sponsor of this legislation, John Brademas, maintained that ‘the arts are
essential’ because ‘art and artists make an immense difference by enriching our lives as
individuals and building a culture that illumines and enobles us’. He argued that art would
‘nurture the creativity of our nation’. The evidence given in support of this assertion was a
quotation from Robert Motherwell, who declared that cultural creativity gives renewed focus to
discovering real selves: ‘an artist is … a person skilled in expressing human feelings’ (quoted
in Brademas 95, 104–05). Such a statement need not be in opposition to the more overtly
programmatic economic or political goals revealed by the NEH's quasi-religious 1985 Annual
Report:

Page 16 of 28 SAGE Books - Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy
SAGE SAGE Books
© 2002 Toby Miller and George Yúdice

The humanities are vitally important to the educational and cultural life of our nation,
constituting as they do the soul of civilization, which has been formed over the
course of the centuries. Preserving and transmitting this tradition serves to nurture
and sustain our national character, helping to make the United States worthy of its
leadership in the world. (quoted in Stimpson 34)

This Olympian mission reveals a significant fit between a humanistic faith in renewal of the
social order through expression of the artistic persona, and a more vigorously confident
aesthetic underwriting of military and economic power. No wonder George Bush fits could
speak with such chilling certainty of his binary view of good and evil as civilizational markers in
the aftermath to September 11, 2001.

Early in the Cold War, US cultural sponsorship claimed that freedom inhered to American
modern art, in contrast to the command culture of the Soviet Union. The end of the Cold War
required a new legitimizing narrative, discernable in the cultural sector's current claim that it
can solve US social problems: enhance education, salve racial strife, reverse urban blight
through cultural tourism, create jobs, reduce crime and perhaps even make a profit. Much as
in classic cases of governmentality, artists are channeled like service providers to manage the
social. And just as the academy has turned to ‘managerial professionals’ who bridge
traditional liberal professions, ‘a technical body of knowledge, advanced education …
professional associations and journals, codes of ethics – and corporate middle management
in the business of producing students, research, outreach, institutional development, etc’
(Rhoades and Slaughter 23) – so the cultural sector has burgeoned into an enormous
network of arts administrators who mediate between funding sources, on the one hand, and
artists and communities, on the other. Like their counterparts in the university and business
worlds, they must produce and distribute the producers of art and culture. As per Dworkin,
they are simultaneously clarifying, abetting, modifying, and countering market tastes.

This is often contested terrain, as social movements call on the state to maintain the varying
identities that comprise its citizenry, and conservatives insist on a more assimilated unity.
Proponents of cultural citizenship argue that social identity is developed and secured through
a cultural context where collective senses of self are more important than individual ones, and
rights and responsibilities can be determined in accordance with cultural membership rather
than the individual (Fierlbeck 4, 6). For some critics, this flexibility can be achieved through a
doctrine of cultural rights. For others, it is a by-product of universal access to education, a
‘primary condition of free and equal citizen participation in public life’ (A Rorty 162). This latter
position opposes public funding to sustain specific cultural norms of familial or religious origin,
calling instead for a curriculum designed to generate cosmopolitans who learn about their
own country's public life and their ‘global neighbors’ in a way that does not adjudicate
between identities as workers, believers, or any other forms of life that exist alongside one's
culture of origin (A Rorty 164). Such a position is a collectivist flipside to human-capital
arguments about liberal individuals maximizing their utility through investment in skills. Each
is fundamentally concerned with efficient and effective social life.

National and Supranational Identities and State Projects

Having established the historical and philosophical trace of cultural policy, we now turn to its
history in a national and supranational world. Nations and regions frequently declare their
cultural specificity in order to legitimize and materialize unity, sometimes through
decentralization and sometimes via centralization. So the Federal Republic of Germany put

Page 17 of 28 SAGE Books - Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy
SAGE SAGE Books
© 2002 Toby Miller and George Yúdice

individual Landers in charge of cultural policy. Each Lander has a ministry for the arts. But the
French system is centralized. A national Ministry of Culture employs many thousands of
bureaucrats across archives, museums, performance, film, music, dance, books, and
heritage, supplemented by over 20,000 private associations dedicated to culture, many of
which receive state assistance (Home ‘Structure’). Prior to Canadian confederation, the 1850s
saw pressures to impose cultural protectionism in the shape of a tariff on books, as a means
of promoting national identity through locally-produced literature. One might consider this in
the same light as the proliferation of Canadian Government investigations of cultural
nationalism since the Second World War (numerous Royal Commissions and policy reviews,
going to such matters as the need for locally owned, locally textual culture industries) and
major surveys of public opinion on cultural identity over the same period. These instruments
represent an anxiety about putatively ‘discrete’ national entities in the face of a homogenizing
multinational/US superforce. But they are also about industry policy – through a substitution
effect that seeks to displace one source of production (foreign) by another (local), alongside
an ideological effect.

Similar forces were at play in the most vibrant Latin American economies and societies of the
1920s and 1930s – Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. They were characterized by corporatist
pacts between state-aligned elites, who promoted import-substitution industrialization (ISI)
and developmentalism, and an equally state-aligned popular nationalism that sought state
welfare. The origins of the huge bureaucracies that provided support for a ‘national-popular
culture’ can be traced to this paradoxical situation, which recreated the Western European
entities that had been most responsible for supporting culture: education, radio, film, and
ethnographic museums. ‘People's culture’ was disseminated from these venues, not outside
the market, but within the culture industries, which were controlled and sometimes subsidized
by the state. The most salient examples are samba and carnival in Brazil, and radio and film
rancheras in Mexico. The nationalization of samba, for example, involved the intervention of
the Vargas regime in the 1930s in the music industries, in various social institutions like
carnival and ‘popular’ networks (Raphael; Vianna). This produced the very culture in whose
name such arts were supposedly undertaken. In the process, the state became an arbiter of
taste.

As we have seen, such taste formation is inevitably about forms of life as much as forms of
art. For example, David Birch argues that the discourse of pan-Asian ‘values’ was invented
across the 1970s and 1980s to protect oligarchical and monopolistic power structures in
South-East Asia that felt threatened by the popular-cultural corollaries of international
capitalism and their message of social transcendence, whereby commodities are said to
animate a new world, a new life. Asian values’ became a distinctive means of policing the
populace in the name of an ‘abiding’ idea of personhood that was in fact a reaction to the
growth of capitalism and participation in international cultural exchange, while press freedom
was constrained in the name of nation-building (Birch ‘Constructing’ and ‘An “Open”’).
‘Asianness’ became an alibi for domestic social control.

The exercise of authority has come to rely on the ability to enunciate a partial past, an account
of history that births the present in an appropriately linear way and can be made to identify
the concerns of the public (established in part through constitutive exclusions) with its
collective heritage. We draw here on Tony Bennett's understanding of history as ‘the locus
through which the representations of the past circulated by the institutions comprising the
public historical sphere are brought into contact with the historical record in order to be either
corrected by it or allowed to change with it’. Historians act as referees for example, in
discussions over museums, heritage sites, and historical mini-series (Bennett Outside 50, 290

Page 18 of 28 SAGE Books - Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy
SAGE SAGE Books
© 2002 Toby Miller and George Yúdice

n. 17, 163–64). It follows that cultural policy produces zones of public memory and learning,
organized by rules and colored by debates in historiography, that regulate the past, in a way
that is determined by the concerns of the present.

Re-engineering history is the principal means by which Mexico charted a new and more
inclusive national identity as it broke with a nineteenth-century, post-colonial but Eurocentric,
legacy The revolutionary Mexican Constitution of 1917 ushered in a new national project of
mass education to jumpstart the economy, incorporate the masses, and create a large
educated and nationalist middle class capable of resisting the power of caudillos (local
bosses) as well as national and foreign oligarchies. Education projects embodied artistic
expression in the muralist movement, identified with los tres grandes (the three great ones):
Diego Rivera, Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Muralism infused the public face
of Mexican identity with strong indigenist features. This movement was engendered by José
Vasconcelos, who was appointed in 1920 by Presidents Huerta and Obregón as Director of
the Departamento Universitario y de Bellas Artes, which included the Secretaría de
Instrucción Pública y Bellas Artes (subsequently Secretaría de Educación Pública or SEP).
Cultural and educational policy were intensified and further institutionalized in the 1930s
under the populist president Lázaro Cárdenas, with a greater focus on incorporating
indigenous populations, expanding arts education, defending national patrimony, and
regulating the film industry (R Johnson 136).

This (re-)engineering of history is usually contested terrain, for all the efforts of governments.
The well-documented struggle between Jewish leaders to construe the Holocaust as a
uniquely Jewish event, Ronald Reagan's identification of the Soviets with the Nazis (even as
he attempted to appease the Jewish community in the US) and conservative Germans’ claims
that Nazi soldiers were also victims, exemplify such contestation (Friedman). And consider the
struggle over cultural appropriation that broke out in Canada in the early 1990s. Native
Canadian writers were concerned that their Voices’ had been subject to ‘theft’ by whites. The
Canada Council's Advisory Committee for Racial Equality in the Arts responded by issuing
guidelines on the concept that attacked ‘the depiction of minorities or cultures other than
one's own, either in fiction or non-fiction’ (quoted in Coombe 209). The Council decided that it
would no longer issue grants to authors who crossed the boundary between cultures without
the active participation of the ‘other’. Writers replied to this force-majeure collaboration
derisively, claiming the autonomy of art from politics and the need for an unfettered
expression of the imagination in order to unleash Romantic genius. On the other side, the
Council showed signs of an Orientalist commitment to an essential Native Canadian identity,
unchanging and universally distributed by virtue of race. This biological/customary status
supposedly stood beyond history (and hence lacked the ability to change its circumstances)
(Coombe 209–13).

Other uses of national heritage to broker international deals abound. For example, in the
1990s, Taiwan decided to redirect the energies of its performance troupes when touring
overseas. Instead of targeting the diasporic Chinese, such companies would look to open new
markets via ‘international publicity and cultural interflow’, to quote the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs (Wang). In the British case, the Arts Council of Great Britain, formed in 1945 under
John Maynard Keynes, had, as its principal original task, the rescue of Covent Garden from
war-time use as a dance hall, returning the venue to its musical origins as a Royal Opera.
This stress on high culture and centralization in London continued as settled policy until the
mid-1960s Labour government formed Regional Arts Associations, which devolved public
culture (to Scotland and Wales in particular). By the late 1970s, the modernist and political
nature of much publicly funded work drew strong objection from Tory hacks such as Kingsley

Page 19 of 28 SAGE Books - Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy
SAGE SAGE Books
© 2002 Toby Miller and George Yúdice

Amis and Paul Johnson. When the Conservative Party came to power in 1979, one point of
key resistance was Labour local councils, which used the language of economic development
to promise cultural reindustrialization. The national government disestablished local political
representation, putting an end to such initiatives, but retained and developed the principle of
regionalized arts administration (McGuigan Culture 57, 64–65, 106). Many critics doubt the
industrial and aesthetic efficacy of such moves. Consider The Beatles and Liverpool. The
city's music, clothing, football, and voice became part of the fabric of youth culture across the
world. But as Angus Calder notes, the city governors of the time were ‘innocent of “cultural”
objectives’. And its rich 1980s television drama was produced under a radical–left
administration that concentrated on public housing rather than aesthetics (454). Now, the
city's reformist local government uses culture to attract capital investment in heritage tourism;
but there is no clear correlation with cultural innovation. Instead, policy is a mop for
deindustrialized ‘waste’, with gentrification assisted by government. Here, the idea of building
citizenship has been overdetermined by a search for building culture as a substitute for
building ships – a way of quieting citizens whose lives have been buffeted by unregulated
global capital. We turn next to the citizens who have been theorized and produced in this
rootless world.

Citizenship and Culture in a Postnational World

The ideal of citizenship takes three forms: political, economic and cultural. Political citizenship
encompasses voting, the capacity to appeal to representative government, and guarantees of
physical security that people are given in return for ceding the right to violence to the state. As
developed through capitalism, slavery, colonialism and liberalism, political citizenship has
expanded its reach and definition exponentially since the eighteenth century, though it
remains unevenly distributed across the globe. Economic citizenship covers employment,
health, and retirement security through redistribution of capitalist profits and the use of the
state as an agent of investment. Having developed through the Depression and
decolonization, economic citizenship is now in decline, displaced by historic renegotiations by
capital, the state, and their intellectual servants in economics since the 1970s to privatize
economies. Cultural citizenship concerns the maintenance and development of cultural
lineage via education, custom, language, and religion, and the acknowledgement of
difference in and by mainstream cultures. It is a developing discourse, in response to the
great waves of migration of the past fifty years and an increasingly mobile middle-class
workforce generated by a New International Division of Cultural Labor (NICL). As we have
seen, in its role as a custodian of nationalism, the idealized Western state endeavors to form
cultural citizens who will be virtuous political participants through self-scrutiny and self-
improvement. This pedagogic style may appeal to national objectives of economic or cultural
growth, patriotism, educating populations into artistic appreciation, or ‘unlocking’ creative
talent that awaits the opportunity to express itself.

Citizenship is taken as a given in all modern polities, although it does not function identically
across or within different national formations, particularly in those non-Western countries
where it was adopted as a construction of the postcolonial state and where polyethnicity has
been a basis for discrimination. While Germany has recently expanded the rights of ethnically
non-Germanic people born there, by eliminating ethnic criteria for citizenship, Croatia
forecloses economic and political rights to Serbs on the basis of a renewed ethnocultural
citizenship. Theocratic states, moreover, base eligibility to rights on the cultural criterion of
religion, often limiting the citizenship rights of women. And what does it mean to foster self-
improvement via education and museums when 90% of a country's population is illiterate?

Page 20 of 28 SAGE Books - Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy
SAGE SAGE Books
© 2002 Toby Miller and George Yúdice

Literacy programs for example, in Mexican post-revolutionary cultural policy, address this
‘lack’, but do more to incorporate peasants and Indians into a language and labor regime than
endow them with the motivation to ‘improve’. It may be that the dissemination of liberal and
revolutionary ideas embodied in cultural policy, founder in the gap between the juridical
people and the empirical people, as per Kant's analysis of the nation in ‘the character of
nations’. This raises the question of what Roberto Schwartz calls ‘misplaced ideas’.

We are not saying that the Third World fails to develop authentic or autochthonous cultural
policies, but rather that their socioeconomic situation points to the gap between the juridical
and the empirical, the ideal and the real, the Utopian and the present. A Third World
perspective on this may lead to an ethnomethodological view, according to which cultural
policy, even in Europe and the US, is not really about fashioning well-rounded individuals, but
about creating bureaucracies that deal with the problems that the very institution of policies
create! What does it mean in theocratic states for the governance of subjects to be situated in
‘cultural knowledges and practices’? What does cultural citizenship mean in a country like
Colombia, which is divided according to different power groups, and what was the cultural
formation of individuals under late twentieth-century Latin American dictatorships whose
conduct was limited to orthodox norms, where disloyal subjects were ‘disappeared’ or visibly
murdered?

Latin American mimesis deviated from its European models because it was permeated by
indigenous or African-derived practices (e.g. in syncretic religious forms or the unique
baroque designs of church decoration) and Iberians and Creoles cultivated a high culture at a
remove from metropolitan centers and partly beholden to the cultures of the lower classes by
defining themselves against the latter. This would come to be seen by some Latin American
intellectuals in the twentieth century as a source of cultural innovation. The Brazilian writer
Silviano Santiago, echoing Jorge Luis Borges, has argued that by supplementing already
existing models, the constitutively excluded (i.e. Latin Americans vis–à–vis Europe, or blacks
and mixed-race people vis–à–vis Creoles) have been able to appropriate, transform or debunk
status models without fetishizing them. We have here a possible postmodern understanding
of cultural policy as appropriation that characterizes Latin American cultural production at all
social levels, although no cultural bureaucracies have yet shown the temerity to promulgate
‘subversive simulation’ as policy. More typically, the state endorsed the efforts of some colonial
and postcolonial intellectuals to counter America's secondary status by appealing to what was
presumed to be original and thus national: the sublime force of nature, or the greatness of
Aztec and Incan civilizations of the past. But even here they were dependent on the
pathbreaking research of European naturalists (von Humboldt) and ethnographers (Koch-
Grünberg). And European intellectuals were always quick to put down these attempts at self-
valorization. Cornelius De Pauw, for example, argued that all natural species in the New
World were inferior to those of the Old (Gerbi). Many nineteenth-century historians derided
Bolivar as a pale reflection of US independence heroes. Even Marx and Engels endorsed the
annexation of Mexican lands and thought all of Mexico should have been taken by the US in
order to bring it up to date historically, that is, to unleash the ‘objective’ forces of class
struggle by imposing ‘true’ bourgeois rule, in the process creating a proletariat (Marx (1968)
Karl Marx on Colonialism 18).

If nineteenth- and early twentieth-century mimesis was concerned with cultural and economic
development, the contemporary manifestation is the discourse of citizenship rights. Despite its
mission of instilling loyalty in citizens, contemporary cultural policy is linked by the left to
citizen rights, a means of tying social-movement claims to actionable policy and a newly
valuable form of entitlement that transcends class and is a guarantee against the excesses of

Page 21 of 28 SAGE Books - Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy
SAGE SAGE Books
© 2002 Toby Miller and George Yúdice

both the market and state socialism. On the right, culture is subject to privatization pressures.
Citizens and consumers continue their uncertain dance in the rhetoric of political philosophy,
neoclassical economics and neoliberal policy mandarinism (Zolberg ‘Paying’ 396; Miller Well–
Tempered). An additional division on the right exists between those who consider that citizens’
responsibilities go beyond the self, and those who do not.

Traditional views of citizenship have been thrown into confusion by the extent of late
twentieth-century immigration and multiculturalism (Feldblum 103). Whereas republican
ideals assume a migrant subject who throws off prior loyalties in order to become a citizen, or
nationals of the same country who put aside social divisions in the common interest,
multiculturalism blurs the lines between liberal individualism and collaborative
communitarianism. Of course, liberal individualism is also about the opportunity to accumulate
wealth and resources. It is not just, or even primarily, about transcendence. On the other
hand, communitarianism can result in bloody contests between communities that have
different senses of whose identity is to be recognized and allowed to stand for the whole. And
alongside the drive to discipline the citizen, is the disposition to showcase and market the
citizen. The culture of pre-citizen eras is often advertised in heritage tourism (France's Notre
Dame and Versailles attract more visitors than the National Assembly).2

This new form of citizenship may not locate fealty in the sovereign state, nor does it
necessarily articulate with democracy, as subjects of the international trade in labor lack the
access to power of native-born sons and daughters (Preuss 310). Liberalism assumes, with
neoclassical economics, that people emerge into citizenship fully-formed, as sovereign
individuals with personal preferences. Multiculturalism assumes, with communitarianism, that
group loyalties override this notion. But where communitarianism assumes people find their
collective identity through political participation, multiculturalism assumes, with liberalism, that
this subjectivity is ordained prior to politics (Shafir 10–11). And cultural policy has seen a
series of debates in which seeming polar opposites – the right versus multicultural arts –
appear to be logo-centrically interdependent. Each group dismisses traditional aesthetics in
favor of a struggle to use art to represent identity and social purpose (Yúdice ‘For a Practical’
130). Multiculturalism stresses the need for a grassroots and marginal arts activism, focused
on civil rights, and a combination of demographic and artistic representation and
representativeness. Conservatism calls for an arts practice that heralds Western values and
progress while obeying the dictates of religious taste.

Orthodox histories of citizenship postulate it as the Western outcome of ‘fixed identities,

unproblematic nationhood, indivisible sovereignty, ethnic homogeneity, and exclusive
citizenship’ (Mahmud 633). This history ignores the fact that theories of citizenship were
forged in relation to the imperial and colonial encounters of West and East as a justification of
extra-territorial subjugation, followed by incorporation of the periphery into an international
system of labor. These conditions in turn led to cultural policy concerns with language,
heritage and identity, expressed by both metropole and periphery as they exchanged people
and cultures.

Bonnie Honig has shown that immigrants have long been the limit-case for loyalty, as per
Ruth the Moabite in the Jewish Bible/Old Testament. Such figures are both perilous for the
sovereign state (where does their fealty lie?) and essential (as the only citizens who make a
deliberate decision to swear allegiance to an otherwise mythic social contract). In the case of
the US, immigrants are crucial to the foundational ethos of consent, for they represent
alienation from their places of origin and endorsement of the New World. This makes a
national culture all the more fraught, for just as the memory of what has been lost (by choice)

Page 22 of 28 SAGE Books - Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy
SAGE SAGE Books
© 2002 Toby Miller and George Yúdice

is strong, so is the necessity to shore up the ‘preference’ expressed for US norms.

In Europe, the creation of ‘supranational citizenship’ in 1992 problematized coupling

citizenship to national culture. At the same time that this recognized a new international
division of labor, equivalent moves limited the rights of guest workers. Consider the situation
of those who, because of changed socioeconomic conditions, have turned into officially
acceptable migrant-citizens, such as Asian Australians since the 1970s. Excluding and
brutalizing Asians had been critical to developing a sense of Australian citizenship and
national identity for most of the twentieth century. Asian Australians’ latter-day take on
citizenship is, not surprisingly, instrumental (Ip et al.).

In each case, citizenship is no longer based on soil, blood, or culture. Rather, it is founded on
some variant of those qualities in connection with existing pressures on the capitalist labor
market. The state is no longer the key frame of citizenship, in the face of new nationalisms
and cross-border affinities that no single governmental apparatus can contain (Feldblum 96,
98–99, 101, 110). Supranational citizenship and identity are not only tied to a new
international division of labor, but also to a new trading order, in which juridically established
trading blocs like NAFTA/TLC, the Mercado Común del Sur (MERCOSUR) and the European
Union (EU) make decisions that override national laws. In fact, awareness that the rule of law
transcends the nation state can lead to a more compelling supranational identity, as
witnessed by the exponential increase over the 1990s in the number of cases brought by
individuals to the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights (Roger
Cohen ‘Trade Pact’).

Of course, many migrant workers around the world are neither citizens nor immigrants. Their
identity is quite separate from their domicile and source of sustenance, with equitable
treatment guaranteed not by a sovereign state, but through the supranational discourse of
human rights and everyday customs and beliefs that superintend the legal obligations of
conventional citizenship (Shafir 20, 19; also see Robin Cohen). Activists in these areas
frequently turn to cultural policy to assist in the maintenance and development of collective
identities and their expression in artistic form – hence its importance for the left, and cultural
studies in particular.

Cultural Policy Studies

What is the existing state of English language cultural policy studies? The ur-text on the
economics of cultural assistance was published twenty years ago by Australian-based
researchers, and it is twenty-five years since Herbert Gans’ pathbreaking work on ‘taste
cultures’ provided a multiple layered framework for intellectualizing the popular and its
relationship to policy (Throsby and Withers; Gans Popular 121–59). ‘Cultural policy studies’
was named and undertaken in the 1970s through the formation of the Association of Cultural
Economics and the Center for Urban Studies at the University of Akron. This was followed by
regular conferences on economics, social theory and the arts, and major studies of policy and
program evaluation produced at Canada's Institute for New Interpretive Creative Activities, the
Cultural Policy Unit of The Johns Hopkins Center for Metropolitan Planning and Research, the
Cultural Information and Research Centres Liaison in Europe, and Columbia University's
Research Center for the Arts and Culture. Publications such as the Journal of Arts
Management, Law and Society and the Journal of Cultural Economics have long provided a
wealth of theoretical speculation and empirical reporting and have latterly established
connections to the Washington DC think-tank Center for Art and Culture. Europe now
publishes the International Journal of Cultural Policy.

Page 23 of 28 SAGE Books - Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy
SAGE SAGE Books
© 2002 Toby Miller and George Yúdice

These developments have led to queries about the relationship between a humanities and a
sociological basis to the area: whether there should be, for instance, ‘a social science
aesthetic’, and how the new proxemics of administration, politics, and the arts should be
ethically and technically managed, along with the need for both ‘historical analysis in
policymaking’ and ‘the history of policy’ (Towse and Crain 1; Alderson 5; Hendon et al. x–xi;
Chartrand ‘Subjectivity’ 23–24; Peterson ‘Foreword’ iii, v; Graham 21). But in general, the
social sciences side to the analysis of culture holds onto value-free shibboleths and has not
affiliated with progressive social change.

By contrast, cultural studies has an overt political agenda about social movements and
cultural worker's rights. Angela McRobbie calls cultural policy ‘the missing agenda’ of cultural
studies, given that it offers a program for change (335). But Stuart Cunningham suggests
that:

Many people trained in cultural studies would see their primary role as being critical
of the dominant political, economic and social order. When cultural theorists do turn
to questions of policy, our command metaphors of resistance and opposition
predispose us to view the policy making process as inevitably compromised,
incomplete and inadequate, peopled with those inexpert and ungrounded in theory
and history or those wielding gross forms of political power for short-term ends.
These people are then called to the bar of an abstrusely formulated critical idealism.
(Framing 9)

The notion that theory undergirds practice via a renewing critique taken up by bureaucracies
has often seemed misplaced in the cultural field, where everyday academic critical practice
eschews such relationships as either insufficiently aesthetic or too co-optive. Cunningham
attacks this line of argument as failing to acknowledge, for instance, that public action on
sexism in advertising and the status of women in the workplace have come about because of
a shift from utopic critique to implemented policy. He calls for cultural studies to adopt a
‘political vocation’ that draws its energies and direction from ‘a social democratic view of
citizenship and the trainings necessary to activate and motivate it’. This ‘new command
metaphor’ will displace ‘revolutionary rhetoric’ with a ‘reformist vocation’. Its ‘wellsprings of
engagement with policy’ can nevertheless avoid ‘a politics of the status quo – a sophomoric
version of civics’, because cultural studies’ ongoing concern with power will always ground it
in radicalism. Cunningham uses cultural policy studies as a conduit to cultural rights, access
to information held by multinational corporations, international organizations, the balance of
power between developed and less-developed countries, and how all these developments
have an impact locally (Framing 11). Jim McGuigan welcomes this turn in cultural studies,
provided it retains radical insights by connecting to political economy's emphasis on public
debate and citizenship rights (Culture 21).

At the same time as we support this preparedness to engage actually existing politics, there is
a truly sordid history to academic participation in so-called democratic government. Consider
language-spread policy and the part played in it by linguists, let alone the work of economic
advisors (Robert Triffin acting as plenipotentiary for the US to the European Economic
Community and then as a European delegate to the International Monetary Fund, just a few
months apart, in the 1980s), political scientists (Project Camelot in the 1960s), biomedical
researchers (relations with pharmaceutical companies), public-relations consultants (a critical
concern of the professional associations), anthropologists (cultural-relativist defences of male
violence in court), nuclear physicists (red-baiting of scientists), and communication studies.

Page 24 of 28 SAGE Books - Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy
SAGE SAGE Books
© 2002 Toby Miller and George Yúdice

The very existence of communication research raises questions of ideological distortion, given
the discipline's formation under the sign of war and clandestine government activity and later
corporate and foundation support (God bless the CIA, Wilbur Schramm and Daniel Lerner).

In the US, university consultancies date to nineteenth-century museums, observatories, and

agricultural-experimentation outposts, but the shop was really set up in the late 1950s.
Considerable effort since then has gone into clarifying the significance of tailoring research
priorities to contemporary political parties and corporations: ‘pork-barrel science’, as it is
known. Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell suggest a trend towards homologies between
sponsoring and consulting bodies: when one institution depends on another for assistance, it
tends to mimic its structures and reiterate its concerns (‘Iron’ and The New). Ralph Nader's
Center for Universities in the Public Interest was set up because of such concerns, which are
even evident to former supporters of government/college/industry relationships who have
experienced the obstacles they pose to disinterested research outcomes (Language Problems
and Language Planning; Markoff and Montecinos 44; Ammon 6; Nisbet; Beauchamp; ‘Special’;
Winkelman; Rieff; C. Simpson; Sholle 132; Rowe and Brown 98; Ruscio 209; Stahler and
Tash; Bowie 5, 7; deLeon 886).

The policy sciences, originally conceived as a connection between democratic and executive
action, frequently degenerate into ‘unrepresentative expertise’ that lacks articulation with
public life. John S Dryzek's review of policy analysis suggests that the animating subjectivity
is either of ‘clients or spectators’, not active citizens, while Thomas Streeter points out that
advocacy of a policy focus in cultural studies may be inappropriate in the US, where ‘policy’
connotes a pro-corporate position that turns highly contestable positions into absolutes, with
consultant professors simultaneously performing objectivity and applicability. (For example,
the policy and program management of US National Parks has consistently owed much more
to bureaucratic force majeure, tourism money and ‘development’, than to ecological science)
(Dryzek 117; Streeter 16 n. 14, 133, 136; Sellars 3–4).

It is vital to understand the difference between distilling, invoking and reforming the public
mind. The shift between policy analysis and policy service and advocacy is an important one.
Public administration was the refuge of the worthy but dry academic, until public policy
emerged as a site for carpetbagging academics in search of influence and consultancy
clothing. A rich analysis of political discourse has come from both spheres. And the lessons of
this literature should form the founding texts of cultural policy studies. These lessons provoke
skepticism about the fit between the rhetoric and practice of policy, because animating logics
are often spurious or counter-indicative. Most significantly, social research has cast serious
doubt on the notion that policy works because of the utterance of actionable rather than
expressive proposals. The literature demonstrates the error of aligning organizations and
actors with their statements, their statements with their actions, or either with actual outcomes
(Stark 514–15; Jobert 381; Colebatch and Degeling; Egeberg).

Of course, cultural policy studies does not have to be carried out on behalf of corporations
and the government offices that back corporate welfare. Not all academic and intellectual
involvement bends to the right. The Communist-based intellectuals and academics of the
cultural front were important in keeping New Deal cultural policies from complete
accommodation to Roosevelt's administration; leftists counterbalanced nationalist bureaucrats
in the US's Good Neighbor Policy; antiwar and antiracist activists were instrumental in
establishing new cultural institutions in the 1960s and 1970s; academics joined political and
religious activists in the 1980s in strengthening the solidarity and sanctuary movements on
behalf of Central American insurgencies against US neoimperialism, and their participation

Page 25 of 28 SAGE Books - Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy
SAGE SAGE Books
© 2002 Toby Miller and George Yúdice

contributed to the decentering of the literary canon and the rise of multiculturalism through
the dissemination of texts by indigenous and oppressed people; and today, there is increasing
work on labor rights for graduate students and cultural workers. All of this academic and
intellectual activism is not at odds with instituting policy, but is crucial to that end.
Anthropologists like Néstor García Canclini in Mexico make policy recommendations that avoid
the production and reception parameters fostered by corporate interests. Research with the
US-Mexico Fund for Culture and other Latin American government and non-governmental
initiatives is not designed to further the interests of corporations, but to intervene in such a
way that citizen and cultural rights are respected over the interests of capital accumulation
and traditional elites. Critiques of cultural policy studies can be too knee-jerk, putting into the
same category radical-democratic actors like Sonia Alvarez (formerly of the Ford Foundation)
and Tomas Ybarra Frausto (of the Rockefeller Foundation) with those who promote the
interests of capital and the status quo from the reactionary offices of RAND, Olin, Brookings,
etc.

Some of the resources to conduct research from a radical-democratic perspective come from
foundations and NGOs, the newly fetishized buffers between state, religion, population and
media – prescriptions for third-sector change that can magically mediate between citizen,
government, and corporation. That could help us find ways of dealing with immense
contemporary transformations, akin to the world-economic shifts of two centuries ago that
birthed governmentality Civil society encompasses the amateur institutions and informal
associations that emerged with the European Enlightenment as alternatives to the compulsion
associated with the state's rule of law and the other-worldly mysticism of organized religion.
These new zones were both secular and voluntary, sometimes encompassing the new
phenomenon of the market. Today, with states and markets frequently reinforcing and
validating one another, non-religious, cultural civil society is transformed into a new third
sector that straddles each but is beholden to neither. The US has two million such institutions,
almost all of them formed since 1970. Russia has gained 650,000 since the end of state
socialism, and Kenya births 240 a year. Most NGOs associated with aid are effectively
regranting institutions that utilize state moneys in ways designed to avoid accusations of
neocolonialism from the left and governmental waste from the right. So the US gives US$700
million annually to Africa through surrogates, and Médecins Sans Frontières derives a
significant proportion of its budget from state agencies. Some bodies become captive of their
real funders – so Congress’ taste for good Christian souls holding the purse strings has led to
the neologism RINGOs (religious NGOs), symbiotic relations with governments produce
GRINGOs (governmental NGOs), and corporate self-modeling offers BINGOs (business
NGOs) (Economist). No wonder the World Bank's claim that NGOs guarantee a mixed-
Internet model for the Third World reads so spuriously (Nulens and Van Audenhove 459). This
is clearly an attempt to sidestep the relationship of culture to state and market domination
through a ‘Third Way’. That appeals to cultural studies activists.

NGO rallying cries of expressivity and representativeness can make for real change. Consider
how the place of indigenous cultures in official Mexican national identity was put into question
beginning in the late 1970s, following pressure from indigenous groups and a cohort of
anthropologists and sociologists who worked with them, like Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, Rodolfo
Stavenhagen and García Canclini. They challenged institutionalized indigenism, because it
restricted indigenous people to empirically erroneous and politically debilitating
representations of their culture. Stavenhagen, for example, denounced assimilationist
precepts within the ecology of Mexican identity as promoted by anthropological, museological
and social-service institutions (5). Bonfil Batalla called for a redefinition of the researcher as a
collaborator in the projects of subaltern communities. He proposed this collaboration as a

Page 26 of 28 SAGE Books - Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy
SAGE SAGE Books
© 2002 Toby Miller and George Yúdice

necessary retooling for social scientists who were seeing their traditional functions disappear
thanks to neoliberalism and privatization. These changes displaced the anthropologist from
his or her function as a facilitator of national integration, as per a pact that had been struck
between the state and civil society in the post-revolutionary 1930s (18–19). García Canclini, in
turn, sought not only to refashion the organization, production, marketization, and
consumption of popular culture, but also the creation of a new public sphere and even a new
tourism industry from which to rethink and re-experience culture.

Such debates center key questions in cultural studies: identity, authenticity, authorial genius,
Orientalism (or indigenism), the postcolonial and the state. Clearly, this is appropriate terrain
for applying the insights of the most radical critics, with two questions always kept in mind:
What do policy analysts have to offer without links to social movements? And what does
cultural studies have to offer without ties to institutions? When we think about oppositional
theory, Umberto Eco, Noam Chomsky, Jean-François Lyotard and Garcia Canclini recur as
signs. Some of their most famous work was born of cultural consultancy and state funding:
Eco's TV semiotics for Italian state broadcasting (‘Towards’), Chomsky's transformational
generative grammar for the Joint Services Electronics Programs of the US military, Lyotard's
report on the postmodern for the government of Québec (La Condition), and García Canclini's
postmodern theory of hybridity from a report on indigenous crafts (Hybrid Cultures). These
links to policy are more than investigations of how ‘taste’ becomes ‘technique’, or efforts to
ensure the ‘promotion of the good, the true and the beautiful’, as the editors of a 1980s
volume on comparative cultural policy would have it (Cummings and Katz 5; Ridley 11). Such
instances encourage a positive view of engagement, provided that the paymaster is
subordinated to radical-democratic politics. They suggest a space of intervention.

Conclusion

Albrecht Dürer's Enlightenment-era Painter's Manual proposed a rational cultural policy that
would instruct young people in perspectival and geometric relationships, as per the Kantian
ideal. But Stephen Greenblatt's gloss of Dürer's plans for civic monuments glorifying historical
events indicates how contingent legislated meaning can be:

A victory over rebellious peasants calls for a commemorative column – after all, the
fate of worldly rule, that is human civilization itself, depends upon this struggle – and
yet the enemy is an object of contempt and derision. The princes and nobles for
whom such monuments were built could derive no dignity from the triumph, any
more than they could derive dignity from killing a mad dog … the peasants, of
course, have no titles to seize, and can yield up no trophies to adorn the victor's
monument. Indeed, in the economy of honor they are not simply a cipher but a
deficit, since even a defeat at the hands of a prince threatens to confer upon them
some of the prince's store of honor, while what remains of the victorious prince's
store can be tarnished by the unworthy encounter. (Greenblatt Learning 108–09)

Herodotus’ fifth-century BC Histories begins with what read like today's options for treating the
past: to recount ‘the astonishing achievements both of our own and of other peoples; and
more particularly, to show how they came into conflict’ (43). This hope for cultural policy, that it
could provide a radical contextualization of the present, such that our understanding of
ourselves is itself subject to critical historicization via a questioning of each statement's
conditions of existence, is one positive side to cultural policy for the left.

That turn will not be welcome to all, especially those inclined to critique for its own sake, as

Page 27 of 28 SAGE Books - Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy
SAGE SAGE Books
© 2002 Toby Miller and George Yúdice

some higher good. For Colin MacCabe, ‘almost all appeals to “policy”, like its repellent
semantic cousin “management”, are appeals away from a reality which is too various and too
demanding’ (‘A Post–National’ 192). But getting to know cultural policy and intervening in it is
an important part of participating in culture. Resistance goes nowhere unless it takes hold
institutionally. The gains made in world culture by women and people of color have come
about through harnessing the work of social movements to critiques of state policies and
programs in actionable ways. That must be our axis – social-movement access and
governmental articulation. Much of what you will read in the chapters to come points up what
happens when those links are not in place, and when the less utopic, inclusive side to the
UNESCO remarks with which we began this Introduction are dominant. We hope that our
work aids you to practice the arts of governmentality in order to further a radical-democratic
cultural politics.

1 Bello is speaking of what we now call ‘Latin’ America, for until World War II, and even after it
in some cases, Latin Americans referred to themselves collectively as Americans’, and to
Anglo-America as the US or North America.

2 Of course, we cannot limit heritage tourism to the citizen frame, especially since so many
visitors are foreigners. Heritage accrues to those who are current citizens, which may be
inaccurate historically, as in those countries where indigenous cultures are celebrated as
national patrimony by the descendents of settler colonists.

cultural policy
governmentality
citizenship
taste
cultural studies
art
new international division of labor

http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446217207.n1

Page 28 of 28 SAGE Books - Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural

Policy