So, I ended the blog last week with the example of education and a video from Stewart Lee. I used the excerpt from him to illustrate his point about how education in itself was a goal in itself – it was substantively rational in the most Weberian meaning of the term. Yet another thing Stew said was the difficulty in defending the value of education or art in itself in terms of future financial gain. For those of you that didn’t see the video here’s the important quote, where they’re discussing Thatcher’s dismissal of the value of a student’s PhD in Norse Literature:

Interviewer: It’s wrong commercially though isn’t it? Because if you look at the Lord of the Rings, those films wouldn’t exist without Tolkien…

Stewart Lee: Well, yes, that made a lot of money didn’t it… But you know what, the problem of that is… then you’re being drawn into fighting the war on their terms

This is another key thread that’s occurred in my research thus far. I conducted research into Gaelic during my Masters year and I have continued to think about this research and the issues with the language ever since. As a person brought up in the Hebrides, I like most people was never far away from Gaelic whether you loved the culture or resented it. My only resentment with the language when younger was the amount of time it took me away from subjects that I was more interested in at the time (contrasted to my resentment with my younger self for rejecting it). Yet most people resent the language in terms of the money spent on it – especially in years of recession.

Over the past decade or so the Creative Industries (or formerly Cultural Industries) are now seen as the future source of economic value in the economy. Most prevalent is the “Creative Class” thesis promoted in academia by Richard Florida and advocated politically by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport in the UK. Here the creative industries are described as:

“those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property” (DCMS, 2001: 5)

DCMS (2014) estimates a sector of the economy that employs over 1.7m people and contributes £71.4bn to the UK economy. Employment includes various occupations within the arts, advertising, film production, performing arts, software development, etc. Tied to this “discovery” of a “new” creative economy, there “has also been increasing interest in the whole question of language, culture and diversity as a motor for economic change” (Chalmers and Danson, 2011: 95). Instead of seeing culture as a value in itself, cultural forms (visual art, minority languages, etc) have increasingly had to be justified in terms of the potential economic benefits it may bring.

Stewart Lee: “They talk to these people as if the only point of the art were to make money for shops in the West End because people on the way to the West End were buying crisps…”

Pierre Bourdieu (someone who’ll be a recurring character in this blog) argued that the dominance of these rational action theories – or economic explanations for social behaviour – within society has seen all value-judgements (interests) assessed in terms of this economic reasoning. For Bourdieu it is illogical to consider interest in something other than money as essentially “disinterested”. Instead, to address this, Bourdieu famously adopted some of the language of economics in order to argue that social life is a game where individuals act to maximise their capital. Rather than only acting to increase their monetary capital, people act to increase their stores of cultural capital (knowledge, cultural taste and appreciation, linguistic abilities), social capital (relationships, networking) and symbolic capital (specific types of honour and prestige), etc.

Now this may seem like a slightly obvious point that people have non-financial interests – but when it comes to Gaelic, revival initiatives have been argued in terms of the economic gains it can make through tourism and Gaelic jobs. Out with language, we see how we maybe change our opinion on our favourite bands changes based on how big they make it – or rather, how more “interested” in money they seem is related to how they lose prestige and honour in our eyes. A key part of the research I’ve done has been to examine the relationship between symbolic value of recorded music or Gaelic language and more commercial concerns. I’ll come back to both subjects repeatedly over these blog posts!

More thoughts next week.