Read ‘Culture is not an industry’, by Justin O’Connor
Since I moved back to Australia and started working at a university, I’ve been struck by how people in higher education here refer to those sectors outside of academia with the blanket term ‘industry’. The typical use is something like, “We should invite some participants from industry to this workshop“ or “We need some industry partners on this research bid”. But what is meant by ‘industry’ here is actually the private and public sector combined i.e. anything not in higher education or community sector gets bundled up as ‘industry’.
I try to correct this wherever possible, as government is not an industry any more than community is. The public sector is not an industry. Dictionaries from Oxford to Merriam Webster will tell you what an industry is, and it’s something along the lines of “the companies and activities involved in the process of producing goods for sale, especially in a factory”. Perhaps I underestimate the sectorial acuity I must have developed growing up in Sheffield and Manchester, in terms of spotting the difference between, say, a Tata-owned steel rolling mill versus the Royal Festival Hall or a community arts programme.
To unthinkingly elide the public purpose, civic sensibilities, and environmental responsibilities of government and the public sector with the catch-all word ‘Industry’ speaks to a public and civic life crushed by the wheels not of industry per se—there’s nothing wrong with industry, unless there is—but of the overwhelming primacy of neoliberalism, a positioning endemic in Australia and similar places elsewhere. That this happens in universities, as a matter of course, without blinking, is perhaps particularly egregious. (That it is also revealing of Australia’s attitude to education more broadly is immediately obvious when reading Pasi Sahlberg’s brilliant Finnish Lessons, by way of comparison.)
I chose the above examples of public sector activities for a reason. Festival halls and community arts programmes may stem from the same place that, say, the National Health Service, railways, kindergartens, and urban planning do, hinting at the broad and rich tapestry of public life woven by a multi-faceted public sector i.e. not industry. And so in this context I want to stress that culture is not an industry either.
For the best possible rejoinder to the horribly diminished notion of ‘cultural industry’ or ‘creative industries’—and thus the narrowing of public life more broadly—you can now read Justin O’Connor’s new book Culture is not an Industry: Reclaiming Arts and Culture for the Common Good (Manchester University Press, 2024). It’s a supremely useful book in many ways – but putting it that way feels almost like faint praise for what is a complete clearing of the decks around the idea, and ideas, of culture.
Full disclosure: Justin and I have been friends and colleagues for 30 years now. He was supervisor for my Masters degree, even. We wrote this essay, ‘Cottonopolis and Culture’—on Manchester, Sheffield, popular culture and place—back in 1996. We now both work in universities in Australia, despite our northern English roots, and have worked together many times over the years. I read an early draft of the book, and Justin asked me to contribute a quote for the back cover. That I did, but I also wrote something a little longer, which I’m reproducing below as it explains a bit more about why I think the book is so relevant:
In ‘Culture is not an industry’, Justin O’Connor makes a powerful case for seeing culture as the foundation of democracy, as the ultimate goal of the city, the way we work towards “new forms of shared prosperity” — and not a mere industry. Here, culture is seen as both the vital life force of everyday life, and the way we collectively imagine, articulate and form possible futures.
Yet before this hopeful repositioning of culture as the engine of our collective imagination, O’Connor carefully tracks how far we have moved from these ideas over recent decades. He is right to be angry about the capture, and subsequent diminution, of culture in both of these modes, thus curtailing our everyday life and attenuating our tomorrows. There are few more brutally satisfying eviscerations of the cold porridge legacy of New Labour than this book, detailing the dead-end of ‘creative industries’ policies and the miserably narrow ‘neo-feudalist’ economics that we have been left to sink or swim in. ‘Culture is not an industry’ is partly a story of how and why our recent decades have been defined by that narrowing.
Yet ultimately this is a forward-looking, inventive, and hopeful book. O’Connor provides a rich overview of what culture means, and what it might mean. In doing so, he gives us new tools for thinking about culture, and by extension, our towns and cities, our natural environments and ecosystems, our communities, our politics. In a framing of culture both scholarly and accessible, O’Connor draws from deep time indigenous understandings, with cultural production inseparable from so-called ‘essentials’, as much from the Enlightenment, alongside his own decades of work with urban cultures.
By excavating possible futures from the sediment of today’s mess, O’Connor projects the book forwards, drawing together examples emerging from shared landscapes around us, peppered with foundational economies, universal basic services, super-local participation, circular systems, social and cultural infrastructures, sustainable environments. In this, O’Connor’s book is a hugely important cultural act in itself, lifting our sights beyond the “damaged present” and imagining new foundations with culture at the heart of a renewed democracy and a collective future reoriented around the common good.
In the book, Justin mentions Brian Eno’s brilliant 2015 Peel Lecture a couple of times—as do I, repeatedly, most recently in my two latest pieces here, on subjects as disparate as Liam Young’s work and circular regenerative practices emerging in Kagoshima, Japan. So I also asked Brian to read Justin’s early draft and contribute a quote too, which he very kindly did, responding:
“Imaginative culture — art, stories, decoration, styles — is how we anticipate the future and feel our way into it: our antennae. Treating culture as an industry subject to the crude rules of neoliberalism doesn’t make any more sense than treating healthcare the same way. Justin O’Connor’s brilliant book argues for a holistic, ecological vision of culture in which it is seen as an essential part of the maintenance of a functioning society.”—Brian Eno
For a further introduction to the themes in the book, framed through a topical lens, you can read Justin’s latest essay on the new UK Labour government’s approach to culture, which is another brilliant, excoriating read. A Guardian editorial back in June 2024 builds directly on the book. Writing from a different angle, James Meek in a recent London Review of Books similarly picks through same the wreckage, manifest in housing, and homes, again using Manchester as a site for broader themes, as it always has been. Housing, particularly when we append that word homes, is clearly not an industry but, like the rest of culture, it contains industry within it. Justin’s book is very good at picking apart this conundrum that has traditionally foxed—or been exploited by—contemporary policymakers in the UK, USA and Australia; that culture includes corporations like Disney, Spotify and Penguin Random House, and yet the cultural sector is much larger than a mere assemblage of firms, no matter what their scale, and that cultural activity and meaning is larger again.
To put it another way … I’m reading Philip Glass’s autobiography ‘Words Without Music’ at the moment, and Glass recalls Ornette Coleman saying to him, “Don’t forget, Philip, the music world and the music business are not the same.”
As Justin suggests, we might learn from this enriched and complex definition, in terms of thinking through, and organising, other everyday infrastructures. So ‘Culture is not an industry’ is important not simply for its ‘case’ for culture, but also where it places culture: at the base of a broader, deeper definition of prosperity—something that Treaty here in Victoria is cultivating, interestingly—as well as the re-kindling of interest in the common good.
As the example of Treaty suggests, such ideas can work without the context of the state. In a First Peoples context here in what we call Australia, culture is embedded in Country and vice versa, something Justin touches on, noting that “When Indigenous peoples talk about culture, it is of something foundational to their lives, inseparable from them”.
Within the state, Andrew Mellor’s The Northern Silence: Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture (2022) is a wonderful book about the global success of Nordic classical music, powerfully making the case for culture as a core element of the welfare state, of nations, of places—alongside health, education, housing, energy ... I mentioned the book in a recent-ish essay for the 2022 Oslo Architecture Triennial catalogue (which I’ll post here shortly), noting that Mellor “describes how a soft and hard “infrastructure” for music “was born of a political movement that sees culture as part of the welfare state”. This reading of ‘welfare’ effortlessly sidesteps the neoliberal policy cul-de-sac of public funding being allowed only under conditions of market failure, or pinned down in the dismal lower reaches of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.”
This is a similar, or related, position to that of the Foundational Economy Collective, who Justin works with and also draws from in his book. Equally, another colleague, Mariana Mazzucato, is working on a new book on the common good, which will also substantially help ‘tilt the playing field’, as she often puts it, given that economics has little working understanding of perhaps this most important concept. (Here’s some of her early work-in-progess on that theme, and see also a recent article Mariana and I wrote on housing as an environmental common good—in which we reference Justin’s book.) Deb Chachra’s brilliant work on infrastructures also seems relevant here.
Culture is not an industry is a brilliant and wide-ranging contribution to this set (as with several others in the Manchester Capitalism series). It draws deeply from Justin’s vast and deep erudition—which, as far as I can tell, is apparently endless—in order to build the case that culture can indeed be seen as the foundation of what we, as a species, do; that is it indeed “at the heart of what it means to be human.”
As I suggest above, the book is angry in places, but always in a way that is precise and grounded, sometimes funny, and never without good reason—but ultimately it’s forward-looking and … hopeful, in the Solnit-ian sense of that word; in that ‘hope’ is something we have to build together, and this book gives us the tools, material and impetus to build with. Raymond Williams described culture as “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language,” but ‘Culture is not an industry’ not only helps us understand what culture means, but also what it could, and perhaps should, mean.
In that Oslo Architecture Triennial essay, I end by reflecting on prosperity and a broader idea of culture in the context of the city, by deploying perhaps my favourite quote on such things, something I admit I’ve made a poster of, just for myself. In a few words, it evokes the double meaning of the word ‘culture’—both cultural production and the patterns of the everyday—as well as locating a subtle dig at empire and exceptionalism a good 102 years ago. It’s a line from the influential-at-the-time, somewhat variable, often intriguing English architect and historian of the early 20th century Arts and Crafts/Early Modern movement, W.R. Lethaby. In his Form and Civilisation (1922), Lethaby wrote:
“For the earlier part of my life I was quieted by being told that ours was the richest country in the world, until I woke up to know what I meant by riches was learning and beauty, and music and art, coffee and omelettes”
Culture. Learning and beauty, music and art, coffee and omelettes.
Justin O’Connor (2024) Culture is not an Industry: Reclaiming Arts and Culture for the Common Good (Manchester University Press)
