Constructing ‘decency’ : government subsidized cultural production during the culture wars

This article examines the production of normative subjectivity and the construction of ‘appropriate’ and exportable knowledge through cultural policy during the culture wars of the 1980s_1990s in the USA. During this time, the performing and visual arts, and mass media were increasingly seen as the cause, rather than the reflection, of social instability, and quickly became subject to governmental regulation. Focusing on a 1998 US Supreme Court case, National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, I examine the construction and application of decency offered in the oral transcripts, and attend more broadly to the relationship between cultural policy and law. Cultural policy is a technique of governmentality, and a means through which citizenship and national identity is constituted and regulated, and self-governance inculcated. Similarly, law is a key technology through which governance, and subjectivity is produced, constituted and regulated. Policies such as the ‘decency’ clause depend on a series of coercive technologies and practices, which ensure that only particular kinds of individuals are understood as embodying norms that are constitutive of citizen-subjects that the State desires. The introduction of the ‘decency’ clause may be understood, in part, as a response to a perceived failure in the arts community of individuals to effectively selfregulate and embody standard sociocultural norms