Three Nexal Registers: Identity, Peripheral Cultural Industries and Alternative Cultures

Abstract

Processes and policies of neo-liberal globalization are presently providing the general frame for every conceivable cultural policy. This means that cultural policy agents first have to decide either to follow the mainstream, that is transforming the cultural domain into an important new niche for capital accumulation,1 or to oppose (or eventually to bypass) the prevailing tendency. The main agents of the first alternative are entertainment transnational companies. Those outside the mainstream controlled by the core transnational cultural oligopolies are, most prominently, peripheral cultural industries for whom culture certainly is just a domain of capital exploitation – but who have to activate various peripheral or marginal social dimensions in order to circumvent the stronger mainstream competition. On the other side, there are agents for whom culture is not just another continent to be colonized for capital gain, and also others who pretend to entertain such a culture-oriented attitude in order to safeguard their share of profits, a share they would not be able to retain on purely market terms. As a starting approximation, we will present cultural agents as distributed along two axes, the axis of their orientation and the axis of their structural position. To the rough directional distinction between ‘profit-oriented’ cultural industries and ‘culture-oriented’ productions, we will add the positional opposition between ‘mainstream’ and ‘marginal’ production (Figure 11.1).