One of the key challenges in understanding cultural policy, and in particular, why states have cultural policies, is the array of policy terms and uses of terms in relation to its positioning and valuing by the state. This refers to the relative conflation of concepts such as value, role, purpose, benefit and rationale. While some of these terms aim to address what cultural policy is, more often than not, they constitute what cultural policy does, leaving a gap in relation to what might be called policy principles. For example, the use of concepts such as value, an a priori economic concept, is typically used to describe a feature or characteristic of cultural policy that is personally held. Similarly, policy purposes/functions (to either have use or not have use) are often used interchangeably with policy benefits to describe an outcome of culture or cultural policy.
However, as used, these terms do not clearly articulate the policy principles behind culture as an arm of government and are both imprecise and contingent. As such, social and economic legitimation discourses within cultural policies demonstrate a value
30 The use of the arts in ministerial nomenclature in Europe continues in Scotland (under cultural policy), Northern Ireland, Austria and the Republic of Ireland. Ireland’s cultural ministry adopted the term culture, as opposed to arts, for the first time in 2010, when it changed from the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism to Dept. of Tourism, Culture and Sport. In 2011, after a general election, it changed back to the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. In the UK, arts policy was replaced by cultural policy in 1997 (Bennett, 2006 p. 122).
system that infers a “justificatory” (Chiapello and Boltanski, 2002, p. 7) rationale behind investing in culture, but also articulates the benefits of culture to societies.
Though Jesuitical, while these concepts might be viewed in aggregate as inferring the principle or purpose for cultural policy (or what cultural policy is), discrepancies can be determined between the philosophical basis on which culture is funded (arguably the moral or series of values on which cultural policy is based), the benefits of culture to societies (the advantages or profits of culture), and the purpose of cultural policies or what they are designed to do as public policies (the ultimate aim or function of cultural policies). This use of these terms, therefore, illustrates the difficulties with generating more precise understandings of government support of cultural policy.
In addition, further categorisations of cultural values/uses/benefits into extrinsic, external or secondary, and intrinsic, internal or primary, and contestations around those terms, compounds these complicated characterisations of cultural policy, as Chapter One has outlined. To illustrate this, it is worth reconsidering descriptions of the nature of these value systems. Extrinsic value discourses are usually associated with instrumentalism and have been linked to the non-personal, secondary “externalities”
(Towse, 2003, p. 22), benefits, outcomes, or spill-over effects of culture (Banks and Hesmondhalgh, 2009, p. 422). However, while intrinsic value has been described as the
“subjective experience of culture, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually” (Holden, 2006, p. 14), confusion arises where it is defined as embodying three separate benefits:
as purely “private”, with benefits for the individual alone; as having “spill over” and extended benefits to the public; or as purely “public”, with direct and publicly beneficial outcomes (McCarthy et al., 2005, pp. xv – xvi).
These categories, particularly the last one, highlight difficulties with separating out the characteristics of culture as either intrinsic or extrinsic. As such, the capturing of various characteristics which may seem intrinsic (i.e., cognition, health, social, communication), can equally be viewed as a strategic output with spill-over public benefits and, critically, at some level has a measurable economic value. Aesthetic benefits (often equated with intrinsic values) have also been described as “artistic instrumentalism” (Knell and Taylor, 2011, p. 18) which offer “individual and societal outcomes”, as well as “public good instrumentalism” (ibid., p. 23), further problematising distinctions between intrinsic and extrinsic.
Policymakers and theorists have responded to these debates by asserting that as all values are “socially constructed”, it is “unsustainable to argue that objects, practices or institutions have intrinsic qualities that subsist within them” (DCMS, 2010, p. 20) and that instrumentalism, closely associated with extrinsic values, is simply an
“interpretation” (Røyseng, 2008, p. 5). Equally, it is also claimed that policy problems arise where intrinsic values are interpreted in a strictly romantic, autonomous and artistically disinterested tradition (rather than the strategic ones listed above), in light of policy’s de facto role as a public instrument (as indicated historically) putatively pursuing public value (Vickery, 2011). Discourses around intrinsic value, therefore, are a “consistent philosophical [and political] problem” for cultural policy (ibid., p. 21) and are central to debates between Arnoldian moralising fine arts (see 4.2.2) and functional economic and social interests.
While for some, therefore, romantic discourses represent the benign intention to
“insulate art from demands that it be useful”, an “unintended” consequence of romantic
values, as indicated above, has been the perception of the arts as elite and thus “remote, esoteric, and removed from life” (McCarthy et al., 2005, p. 38). These struggles are reflected in calls to find the “necessary language” (Tusa, 2011, n.p.) to describe or evaluate culture in terms that cultural practitioners and policymakers can support, though there is an emphasis on the cultural sector’s “own terms” and search for its
“unique language of the arts” (ibid.). What the “unique language of the arts” is, remains unclear, but is hinted at in moves for cultural practitioners to avoid “alien” (economic and social) valuations which “belong to a different world” (ibid.) and represent the
“language and function” of others (Variant Editorial Group, 2011, n.p.). It can be said therefore, that intrinsic and extrinsic discourses of culture are interdependent and emerge from a genealogy of reflexive, historical and defensive categorisations of culture, and latterly, the need for legitimation of publicly funded culture. As such, intrinsic and extrinsic value discourses appeal to different mandates and constituencies, and when used together, draw on the persuasive power of covertly conflicting discourses (Fairclough, 2003, p. 128).