Page 14 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

THE RISE OF CULTURAL THEORY

a distinctively capitalist system of economic organization. Sociologists,
historians and economists typically use the term “capitalism” to describe
a kind of economy in which goods and services are produced only in
order to be sold as commodities in a more or less competitive market;
in which production is organized by individual or collective “capitalists”,
who advance the capital (in the form either of machinery or of money)
necessary for production, and who are motivated in principle only by
the pursuit of the maximum possible profit; and in which labour is
itself a commodity that the capitalist is able to purchase at the price of
salaries or wages. Capitalism defined thus clearly represents the
dominant “mode of production” in the modern world.
Capitalism is also, however, the dominant form of organization of
modern cultural production. Indeed, a strong case can be made for
the view that the book trade was in fact the first modern capitalist
industry: as Febvre and Martin observe, “the printer and the bookseller
worked above all and from the beginning for profit”. This historically
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novel mode of cultural production required for its eventual success
not only the general development of capitalist forms of organization
but also a number of factors quite specific to cultural production
itself: the transformation of culture into a form of commodifiable
personal property through, for example, the design of practically
enforceable laws of copyright; the commercialization and
professionalization of writing and publishing which such
commodification permits; the development of techniques of
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“mechanical reproduction”, in the first place printing, but later also
recording, film and broadcasting; and the expansion of the cultural
market as a result, for example, of increases in literacy. This
unprecedented commercialization of cultural production brought about
an equally unprecedented transformation in the social position and
status of cultural producers such as writers, artists, priests and teachers,
those whom we might today designate as, collectively, “the
intelligentsia”.
In tribal societies, insofar as any specialist rôle existed at all for the
intellectual, it was what Williams terms that of the “instituted artist”, 15
a communally sponsored particular rôle, typically that of prophet-
seer. In medieval and early modern Europe, by contrast, cultural
production was organized according to one or another form of
patronage system, that is: “the support of a writer by a person or
institution that protects him but that, in return, expects satisfaction”. 16

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