Jeremy Valentine Tuesday 4th March 2008

The Centre for Cultural Studies presents:

A talk by:

Jeremy Valentine, Queen Margaret University Edinburgh.

Tuesday 4th March

Goldsmiths cinema, RHB, 6pm - all welcome


"Everyone's at it: The Rentier Economy and the Morality of the Cultural Industries"

This paper is written in the spirit, but not the style, of Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees (1705). It begins with a critical analysis of theoretical claims that reduce culture to economy by virtue of the meaningful and embedded nature of the latter. There are two aspects of this critique. Firstly, an internal one directed at the assumption of a telos of homogeneity in cultural economy approaches. Even though the notion of economy is broadened everything is located within an equilibrium. Secondly, an external one which draws attention to the coincidence between cultural economy approaches and contemporary political rhetorics of ‘creative economy’. Both aspects naturalise historically specific relations of production through the category of culture and both privilege and generalise cultural industries as the leading edge of wealth production. The paper argues that both approaches are organised by a disavowal of the political dominance of the economic category of rent and the regimes of rights and fees on which it depends. Following a discussion of the problem of rent for capitalism, from Smith via Marx and Keynes to Buchanan, the paper outlines the role of rent in contemporary neo-liberal capitalism and its links to practices of ‘value capture’. The paper concludes with a discussion of the possible reasons for the valorisation of culture in contemporary neo-liberalism and in particular the example of the cultural industries in the formation of moral subjectivity.