Space, Place and Cultural Work

Abstract

In industrial societies, while capital emerged as an ‘abstract’, ‘mobile’ and ‘de-territorializing’ force, in order to be effective, it required grounding in the material world. Indeed, it was largely (if not exclusively) through the process of investment in relatively immobile plants, machinery, infrastructure, labour and land that new commodities were produced and surplus values extracted. In creating profits from these fixed resources, capital was then remobilized to seek out new spaces, so garnering further profits and insuring against devaluation crises and recession. Thus, as various spatial theorists have since argued, it was only through the production of space could space be conquered (see, for example, Harvey, 1989; Lefebvre, 1991). Yet, paradoxically, it was also the case that while the creation of spaces and places may have helped provide capitalism with development opportunities, the social structures that inhered within places had an erratic tendency to generate certain ‘local variations’ (labour alliances, community structures, governments, cultural norms) that offered a threat to capital’s effective operation. Places, then, contained hidden surprises; populated by capricious forces, they were unpredictable and irregular; always fluid and never fixed, to use Massey’s (1993) conceptualization. It is this duality of place that I keep in mind as I examine here the spatial organization of cultural industries and cultural work.