How Hypermodern and Accelerated Society is Challenging the Cultural Sector

The reign of the entrepreneur of the self

Modernity was founded on a political project—that of a rationalized world where progress would march hand in hand with the promise of self-determination for individuals. However, even if individuals find some freedom at the end of the grand narratives in reference to which meaning was given, some authors argue that we are witnessing the failure of modernity's great emancipatory project to find, on the contrary, the fragmentation of the social world, even its liquefaction into individuality without ties or commitment, forcing individuals to find individual solutions to systemic problems (Bauman 2000).

According to Dardot and Laval (2009), neoliberalism is at stake in this respect. It is to be understood as the new global “way of the world” that institutes competition as an imperative in the political, economic and cultural spectrums. This world and its logic transform individuals, their conduct and their subjectivity to produce a new subject, the entrepreneur of the self, surrounded by generalized competition mechanisms stemming from the “multiplication and intensification of market mechanisms, relations and behaviours” (Dardot and Laval 2009, 403). In such a context where responsibility for making one's life a success is internalized by individuals to the detriment of social determinisms and impacts of collective action, human relations are marked by contractualization, which has replaced alliances that hinge more on reciprocity and kinship. This world's ideal is the efficient individual, focused on productivity and performance not only at work, but in all aspects of life.

This analysis is congruent with other explanations to the effect that enlisting individuals in the race is no longer just a matter of coercion or discipline, but involves the inner register of desire, the illusion of freedom and self-realization (Aubert and de Gaulejac 1991). Far from being out of modernity, we may now live in the context of hypermodernity, characterized by an accentuation of modernity's features. A hypermodern society (Aubert 2003, 2004, 2010) is marked by a constant sense of urgency, instantaneity, and even confinement to the present. Hypermodern individuals are in a “tense flux”, prisoners of “real time”, detached from the past and future, no longer able to distinguish what's essential to build meaning. Technologies, media and communications are producing ever greater speed and the dynamics of hyperconnection imply that instantaneousness and immediacy now characterize many of our social interactions. This has striking effects on our modes of consumption, production and innovation in the cultural sector as well as on our democratic institutions, and places of convergence of social changes.

Time, speed and acceleration

Time and space compression (Harvey 1989), the scope of which is tied to globalization mechanisms, punctuates the pace of today's society, affecting all aspects of our personal and professional life experiences, our democratic institutions, and forms of collective action. Social time, first experienced as concrete time, evolving at a pace set by nature and the body, became partly replaced by the abstract ticking time of factory clocks and the necessities of social coordination in a society with highly differentiated functions and under the dominance of the market. We are now finally being exposed to the literally shattered time of the network and digital world so focused on speed, flexibility, and efficiency (Sennett 1998), which must, more than ever, be factored into the social reflection if we wish to escape its corrosive effect on the human experience (Hassan 2009).

Hartmut Rosa (2010, 2012), from the Frankfort School, attempts to show the political and ethical consequences of a rupture in the temporal structures and horizons that mark the passage from modernity to late modernity, a rupture characterized by acceleration. He poses social acceleration as a faster pace of social transformations. Analytically, the manifestations of social acceleration can be broken down into three aspects: technological acceleration, acceleration of social changes and acceleration of the pace of life. Its motors are economic and cultural as well as sociostructural. In his view, the phenomenon of social acceleration must be considered if we are to understand the reality of social practices and institutions because the temporal structure and horizon constitute the junction between systemic logics and action logics: that is, the junction between the system and the actors. Although actors believe time to be a “natural datum”, its social construction is nonetheless generated by social coordination mechanisms and the outcome of social and political struggles that we need to take into consideration.

While on one side speed and acceleration bear the promise of an intense life, densely filled for some, others experience numerous contradictions that lead to a crushing experience of a compressed present, to pathologies of excess and meaninglessness, and even alienation. It is then important to acknowledge that multiple temporalities coexist, whence the notion of timescapes (Adam 1998, 2004), which invites us to pay attention not only to their succession over time and their coexistence, but also their organization into a hierarchy and their power effects in the social relations of time (Martineau 2016). Time, as we are increasingly witnessing, is a crucial challenge in the new forms of injustice at the core of contemporary social struggles (Bureau and Corsani 2012; Chesneaux 2000).

In sum, in a world where the accelerating effects of globalization, capitalism, and neoliberalism combine, the entrepreneur of self is the dominant figure of the subject struggling for recognition in a web of concurrency and in the overwhelming dominance of market mechanisms and relations. We have yet to study in depth how practices, organizations, and institutions of the cultural sector are being affected and challenged by this hypermodern and accelerating context.

Culture in the Age of Acceleration, Hypermodernity, and Globalized Temporalities, by Jonathan Martineau

This special issue is dedicated to introducing and raising questions regarding these relevant challenges of our time. The first article from Jonathan Martineau will set the table with a historic perspective on changes pertaining to time, both working time and leisure time, under the emergence and deployment of capitalist society. Doing so, he has highlighted some trends that affect the cultural sector and which will guide and complement our reading of the following articles that will be presented and analyzed transversally with these concerns in mind. This will lead us to raise some overall considerations on research to be pursued in this vein to enhance the contribution of academic work on the transformations of the cultural sector in this era of hypermodern and accelerated society.

In the first article, Culture in the Age of Acceleration, Hypermodernity, and Globalized Temporalities, Jonathan Martineau demonstrates how a historical perspective is needed to fully understand how the “processes and changes in the sphere of time relations and temporal regimes can provide a background through which one can identify key ways in which the cultural sector has had to adapt to the reconfigurations of the time regime” in capitalist society and globalized world (this issue, 227).

After describing the emergence of contemporary global time regime through three historical moments (clock time, world standard time, and network time) Martineau develops in more detail the particularities of the capitalist regime as it radically changed the conceptions of economic time and leisure time that were found in the Ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Middle Ages and Renaissance periods of history, notably along class lines. At these different epochs, even though with some variations, leisure time or personal time was mostly conceived as being an extra-economic time, which means kept apart from economic necessity, public duties or business. It was a time for contemplation, philosophy, and socialization, or some kind of withdrawal for revitalization or simply idleness, according to epoch or social class.

With the advent of capitalist market economies, as the market took control of labor processes and workers' time, labor time became commodified, routinized and emptied of its social dimension. The working classes attempted to resist temporal alienation inherent in the labor market and struggles over working hours led to the institutionalization of the 8-8-8 regime—eight hours of work, eight hours of leisure time and eight hours of sleep, five days a week. In this time regime, leisure time was then kept separated from the sphere of economic production. But, considering the need to rest between exhausting labor shifts, leisure time was rarely practiced as a period of personal fulfillment, even less for women whose main responsibility was unpaid housework.

This highly sequential and compartmented time regime has been destabilized in the neoliberal era, notably by the increased use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and its network time (timeless time) making workers accessible at all times and blurring the line between working time and leisure time. In parallel, the rise of sports and entertainment industries, in the context of mass culture and mass consumption, were key features in the advent of market-mediated leisure time and activities. Intensification and extension of individualistic culture in hypermodern society fed the need for experiential gratifications and brought consumption to “a form of construction of the self” (this issue, 223), but not exactly of the kind that nurtures self-realization.

While a naively optimistic literature on the imminent rise of a leisure society still produces the occasional best-seller promising a potential for eudaimonia for all classes, one look at time-use data is sufficient to reveal that leisure time has been more and more colonized by activities of consumerist entertainment, which it would be quite extrapolative to equate with any form of meaningful working towards eudaimonia or self-realization (223, italics in the original).

This is one of the main points, salient from a historical perspective, that Martineau brings to light in drawing the picture of transformations of leisure practises under the influence of capitalist market economy and its impact on contemporary cultural practices. Among the different conceptions of leisure time, Martineau underlines the importance of leisure time as an opportunity for self-realization (eudaimonia) as it is this dimension that can be best associated with arts and culture as a space-time for the expression of the self and the connection with our humanity and that it is one the most challenged dimensions of our time in capitalist and accelerated society, as he intends to demonstrate. Building on a critical presentation of Hartmut Rosa's theory of social acceleration, Martineau raises the need to try and find an explanation “to this widespread subjective experience of acceleration … that critically engages with some qualitative aspects of time” (this issue, 226, italics in the original).

As people spend their leisure time in consumerist practices, or passive rapid entertainment, the feeling of acceleration overwhelms the counteractions that would come from meaningful self-realization practices that would carry with them tendencies to slow down the pace at which individual agency is exercised, especially since these practices are rarer and demand more attention and protracted deliberation and engagement from the individual. (227)

Impacts on cultural practices and experiences, cultural organizations and institutions are manifold, as Martineau explains. Cultural organizations are constantly under pressure to meet quantitative indicators of market value in the context of budgetary reduction in public funding. This imperative often goes in contention with their artistic missions and the qualitative dynamics of artistic and creative practices and temporalities. In addition, the accelerating effects of ICTs and network time, the diffusion and consumption of cultural products are more ephemeral under the characteristic instantaneousness of the hypermodern world. And finally, new forms of inequality pertaining to time regimes in neoliberal society may undermine access to culture to a wide segment of society, notably for reason of precarious working and life conditions.

Presentation of the following articles of this special issue

It is with these very relevant ideas in mind that we will present and comment on the content of this special issue. We will first see how market imperatives and neoliberal reign of the entrepreneur of the self put the professional development of artists under the need to develop entrepreneurial, business and economic skills and tools in order to manage their career in a competitive world (Olshan). We will then be exposed to the symbolic power that characterizes the tension between independent funding institutions—supposedly taking their decisions at arm's length from political influence and based on quality—and all sorts of more or less subtle ways political interests infiltrates the decision-making processes so that artistic projects' funding as well as Council's budgets come to be legitimized mostly in economic terms (D'Andrea). The next article will present the struggle of ecomuseums, forced to justify their existence along market terms and respond to the government's economic agenda, while they also attempt to resist and offer a cultural space-time of social regeneration in their local milieu (Gunter). Then we will see how changes of the last few decades have challenged identity construction and communication of arts' organizations along the line of democratization of culture, and how they juggle with the issue of “quality” considered having too much of an elitist connotation (Foreman-Wernet). We will then conclude this special issue with an interview of Kevin Mulcahy, conducted at the STP&A 2016 Conference by Jonathan Paquette.

After Art School: Professional Development Training in Nonprofit Organizations by Kelly Olshan

In this article, Kelly Olshan investigates the professional development initiatives of four New York City-based arts organizations—Creative Capital, New York Foundation for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Fractured Atlas—by asking how they view their services in relation to art schools and why they offer this specific training. In recent years, nonprofit organizations have observed a climb in professional development programs for artists. “These programs are designed to help artists navigate their increasingly entrepreneurial, or self-directed, careers” (230). Several participants are arts graduates searching for knowledge and skills that they did not acquire at their academic institutions. This research demonstrates how artist service organizations enhance academic institutions' programs by providing artists new directions and training in areas that they did not know before. It also addresses how these organizations view their role in relation to their target audience, mainly graduated arts students, and the benefits and services that they can offer for them. The study analyzes “these organizations' driving motivations for offering professional development services, including why arts administrators see this training as particularly relevant for arts alumni” (231). The author advocates for arts organizations and art schools to work together to develop a more organized and strong system to help artists.

On the one hand, Kelly Olshan's article illustrates how art graduates and nonprofit organizations are under the control of the market's logic and mechanisms. Artists nowadays must operate through what was seen as separate elements, as aesthetics and economics. Their careers are determined by “‘precarious employment and self-directed entrepreneurialism’” (Lingo and Tepper, cited in Olshan this issue, 231). They must create ventures, present and market themselves as enterprising individuals, and manage their careers. As such, we can see here the pressures put on individuals to conduct their lives and career as an entrepreneur of the self.

Olshan's research shows that the most common topics presented by all four organizations were related to market dominated concerns: financial literacy, business management, arts entrepreneurship, and legal issues. This illustrates that these programs seldom address issues pertaining to identity formation and self-realization in artistic life. Nevertheless, arts alumni express interest in building community values as well as acquiring business training. In that sense, Olshan's research shows different counteractions that may be considered meaningful self-realization practices as, for example, when art students express the benefit they get from meetings and networking with local arts professionals, which “increases their likelihood to stay in their community and contribute to it” (240). The four organizations include in their mission the need to empower artists by helping them gain individual control over their careers. Even if these initiatives rest under an individualist conception of responsibility and success, they might bring some form of reflexivity allowing artists to pay attention to self-realization in their artistic career.

Symbolic Power: Impact of Government Priorities for Arts Funding in Canada by Marisol J. D'Andrea

In the following article, Marisol J. D'Andrea investigates the funding decision processes of Canadian arts councils, at three levels of government (federal, provincial and municipal). These institutions make funding decisions using the peer-review model at arm's length of government agencies, and so should theoretically be free from political interference. Applications are evaluated based on artistic merit and are often shaped by the council's strategic priorities as well. Nonetheless, the peer-review process does not always award funding based solely on artistic merit. Even though the peer-review process is supposed to be free of government influence, it continues to be shaped by the priorities of the government of the day. This research presents the conflict that exists between councils, jurors, and government agencies regarding funding decisions. Through the analysis of three arts councils—the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council—drawing from Pierre Bourdieu's concept of symbolic power, this article examines the means by which government influences funding decisions: It “sheds some light on the extent to which government priorities affect funding decisions” (246). It also shows the government priorities that effectively influence funding decisions, arts councils' priorities that struggle with the attempt of government, and the active opposition to government control.

This analysis shows how, through symbolic power, the government of the day can “establish discourses of legitimacy and generate consensus about reality” (247). Government spending on culture and the arts has been justified by the economic impact of this sector of activity, bringing the actors and organizations in the field to define their projects in turns of costs and returns. Even the Arts Councils must make their own funding renewal or enhancement justified with performance results, mostly in economic terms. And if they try and resist this sole economic logic carried out by the government's agenda, they run the risk of retaliation. As such, market-driven agenda governs funding decisions to the detriment of art's intrinsic value or must be advocated by the Councils and cultural institutions themselves when the time comes to make trade-offs for the distribution of spending between different policy sectors in society. In a more indirect manner, but still in the same costs and returns logic, culture is mostly considered valuable in terms of other policy objectives like tourism or regional development, for example. This is not to mention the fast-evolving and often contested criteria that become part of the Council's priorities, adding to the fragmentation of the field of the arts, especially under the presence of new technologies as we are moving towards the digital society.

Ecomuseums: Challenging Temporality through Community Reappropriation by Christopher Gunter

In his article, Christopher Gunter investigates the écomusées “small, local, and community-owned and managed museum[s]…[that] are community movements in time and space that resist the modern hierarchical practices of the cultural sector” (259). This article presents an innovative kind of cultural institution that faithfully characterizes the local self-identity of a community, and whose functions are focused on empowering local people. Through the analysis of four ecomuseums case studies—l'Écomusée du Fier Monde, l'Écomusée de l'Au-Delà, le Musée Québécois de Culture Populaire, and the Workers' History Museum—the author discovers the central encompassing norms and the community-driven values of ecomuseums that have conducted innovative and inclusive practices. These practices have, on their part, established a “community time and space outside of the national heritage narrative in order to: (1) criticize the current cultural narrative; (2) provide different communal versions of heritage and history; and (3) propose new stories and exhibits that reflect a community's aspirations” (261). These practices could have even possible effects for change in public policy. The ecomuseum could be distinguished as a “unique community space and time” (268) where cultural inclusion is allowed and where people can create and transform divergent stories, places and memories that otherwise would be unseen, misjudged or forget.

On the one hand, Christopher Gunter's article shows that ecomuseums react to market control. He exposes how typical “museums are seen as institutional policy tools that can be used to advance the government's economic and social agendas” (262). These kind of traditional museums must defend their existence by transforming their activities, as educators or social partners for the government or as “tourist attraction[s] or performance venue[s]” (262) with the intention to collect and multiply their funds. On the other hand, ecomuseums as small, local, and community-owned and managed institutions function as counteractions that would come from meaningful self-realization practices. This new type of institution is an initiative to contain current hierarchical actions of government institutions within the community and cultural sector. They result in space and time schism that creates “local empowerment of underrepresented community groups by reappropriating and challenging the modern cultural landscape with implications for public action and public policy” (259).

The four ecomuseums presented in Gunter's work show the willingness to search for eudaimonia or self-realization. These institutions try to accurately represent the local self-identity and goals of the community. In this perspective, heritage is comprehended “as a subjective political negotiation of identity, place, and memory” (260), which may have allowed them to build distinct cultural and social significance.

Reflections on Elitism: What Arts Organizations Communicate About Themselves by Lois Foreman-Wernet

In this article, Lois Foreman-Wernet investigates arts organizations that have been reacting to several cultural and social changes in the past decades. “These changes have resulted in a transformation of the field, including not only how professional, nonprofit arts organizations are perceived by their stakeholders but also how they see themselves” (274). This study sheds light on the question of how flagship arts organizations—symphony, museum, ballet, theatre, and opera– situate themselves within the elitist-democratic continuum. How they are addressing the quality-versus-democracy challenge, and how they talk about themselves in a general way. This research uses both content analysis and case study methods to analyze mission statements and communication materials of several arts organizations in the U.S., namely Charlotte Symphony, Portland Center Stage, and the Columbus Museum of Art. The study shows how each organization communicates its identity; how each one differentiates itself against broader public perceptions of the arts on the elitism-democracy continuum; and how each organizations' ongoing communication aligns with its stated mission. Overall, arts organizations are expressing their unique character and are shaping their position on the democratic side of the elitism continuum, embracing new and different audiences.

What is particularly interesting in Foreman-Wernet's research is to see that, while these cultural organizations try to reach for wider and more diverse audiences, they juggle and even flirt with presentation of their cultural productions in terms of “great experience” (285), “fun” (282), “approachable repertoire” (282), even using apparently dissonant notions like “quality entertainment” (286). In framing their cultural activities “in a less-formal atmosphere” (284), they attempt to make themselves attractive and appear accessible to the most various audiences, thereby promoting inclusion and diversity even at the price of, sometimes, downplaying the issue of quality, doomed to be associated with the elitist dimension of great arts. Nevertheless, it seems clear that these organizations are making explicit and genuine efforts to contribute to the vibrant life of their surrounding communities and doing so not only to bring the people to the arts, but also to bring the arts to the people. Because the case studies concern three rather classic types of arts organizations (symphony, theatre, museum), the results raise questions of general concern about the “quality-versus-democracy challenge” (286) and gives us some cues about the fragile boundary between an easy-going conception of “arts as entertainment” and a more engaging experience participating in the self-realization and collective bonding.

Reflections on Public Culture: An Interview by Jonathan Paquette and Kevin V. Mulcahy

In the last article of this special issue, Jonathan Paquette, associate professor at the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa, who also serves as executive editor of the Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, interviewed Professor Kevin V. Mulcahy, who received the STP&A's first Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016. Throughout this interview, Professor Mulcahy was invited to discuss his career and contributions to the field, as well as his most recent book Public Culture, Culture Identity, Cultural Policy: Comparative Perspectives.

Professor Mulcahy spoke about the important and symbolic role that occupies the province of Québec in his research and work, analyzing its policy, and the interest that he has always had “in the willingness of [the Québécois] to construct a unique society” (291). He added that the discourses of national aspiration were born in the 1960s, labelled as La Revolution Tranquille, a national consciousness that conveys the idea of being one's own master. “This meant not only repatriating powers and responsibilities from Ottawa, but also…assuming power over the land, the culture, and the economy” (293), and also to appeal Québec's elite to assume a role in decision-making processes.

He chose this province, as well as Ukraine, as two examples where identity and cultural policy have been politically salient in recent years. Both cases “share a legacy of hegemony and domination and both have done a great deal in terms of cultural policy” (293). In the case of Ukraine “what has become interesting … is that statehood and nationhood offer different kinds of membership; they do not necessarily coincide or merge” (294).

Regarding his recent book, Public Culture, Culture Identity, Cultural Policy: Comparative Perspectives, Professor Mulcahy stressed the importance of identity and how it must battle hegemonic influences. He said, “that any discussion of cultural policy must take into account the importance of public culture and tradition in giving a sense of meaning to individual political cultures” (291). He added that “Post-colonialism emerged when the colonized recognized and contested regulatory and hegemonic dominance” (293) and that culture is fundamental in this new context because it is the realm in which the political creativity of identity emerges.

He concluded this interview by saying that “cultural policy has been less articulated in terms of a reflection of the population's taste, but it is often seen as a site where an alternative view of identity is offered, experienced, and exposed to the public. Cultural policies in post-colonial societies or societies combating hegemony of oppressions … are using cultural policy as a site to experiment with identity” (293).

In need of cultural policy to resist market hegemony and create time-space for self-realization and social bonding?

In this special issue, we have been concerned by the overwhelming impact neoliberalism and capitalism have on individuals' relations to self, others, and the world as experienced around them. The competitive logic isolates the “entrepreneur of the self” in a race where we can question what is to be won in the end. Martineau offers an interesting reading of our contemporary time regime showing that under market mechanisms and widespread consumerism, little time-space is available anymore, let alone the energy for the active engagement it implies, for activities offering the conditions for self-realization. And this may explain the pervasive subjective experience of the acceleration of the pace of life we are witnessing and its alienating effect. Analysis presented in the research articles clearly shows that economic agenda pervades the artistic and cultural field in a way that affects identity construction and legitimization both for the individual artist and for artistic and cultural organizations. Nevertheless, sometimes overtly or otherwise between the lines, resistance to hegemonic market-led discourses exists and try to find its way to the light of day. In the end, when we peel off the many coats of market logic's ramifications, we find cultural policy to be of paramount importance in fighting not only colonial hegemony as Mulcahy stresses, but this (not so) new way the cultural field has been colonized by the market. Without doing so, the State becomes an accomplice in this loss of meaning of cultural activities and experiences, and communities are left alone to find common ground to build alternative ways to live together and construct time-spaces conductive of self-realization and identity construction.