Governing Tastes

Abstract

The focus of this chapter is on the role that strategies of government play in giving shape to taste, with a particular focus on questions of policy. The chapter will argue that relations between taste and the political context in which tastes are contained are something of a hidden dimension and one with both a significant history and a revealing present in the British experience of cultural policy. Three aspects of this dimension can help to introduce this discussion. The first is the relationships between tastes for specific cultural objects and practices and forms of national identity. Indeed, one might argue that the construction of national identity only emerges alongside the cultural representations through which it is expressed — notably print cultures or ‘literatures’ (Anderson, 2006, Casanova, 2007). Such relationships place considerable emphasis on managing what might be identified as national culture in a context of global cultural flows which, depending on one’s point of view, either swamp and dilute national cultural forms or generate optimistic post-national cosmopolitan taste cultures. The former anxiety has been an abiding one for cultural and media studies, and was very much present in post-war Europe as jazz, milk-bars and streamlined aesthetics in design became the battlegrounds for struggles between established and emergent forms of taste culture.