Rent and Political Economy in Culture Industry Work

Abstract

This paper locates politics in culture industry work at the organisational and firm level through developing the application of the notion of rent to culture industries as revenues from intellectual properties, and as the more general sense of revenues derived from non-equivalential exchanges. The argument is that politics arises from attempts to establish or eliminate rents. The paper discusses ethnographic research on subjectivity and culture industry work and provides a theoretical account of rent in the capitalist imaginary and in explanations of formal problems of power in the entrepreneurial firm as the basis for the analysis of political practices in culture industries. The paper concludes with a discussion of the relation between rent and subjectivity and politics in neoliberalism.

KEYWORDS:

• politics
• neoliberalism
• rent
• culture industry
• contested exchange
• entrepreneurial firm