On the Production and Maintenance of Discursive Power: Cultural Policy Beyond the Nation-State

Abstract

Contrary to current academic thinking, I argue that cultural policy is not in decline but has simply changed form. The ubiquity and vitality of such policies have been obscured from our vision because we do not actually know what we are looking for. This is the case because we have never established a theoretically informed definition of cultural policy. I offer such a definition here, and suggest that once such an optic is mobilized cultural policy reappears as an essential, vital, ever-present, contentious, and powerful postmodern social phenomenon. It is mobilized locally, nationally, and internationally through and around markets by agents who wish to produce, contest, or maintain fields of discursive power.