Mediating Public Cultural Policy: Buildings, Bills, and Films as Governmentality

This article examines how the supposedly new public cultural policy in Sweden during the 1960 and 1970s was mediated and materialized in a number of forms. The cultural policy encompassed both a contradiction between the emphasis on a broadened concept of culture and a more narrow understanding of cultural practices, as well as a conflict between elements of power and control in policymaking, and assertions on the necessarily free character of the cultural domain. Departing from three cases, in form of the government committee report Ny kulturpolitik 1972 and the government bill on cultural policy 1974, the building Kulturhuset in Stockholm 1974, and the information film Jämlikhet – för handikappade? 1973, an approach of governmentality is in conjunction with perspectives of inter- and transmediality implemented in order to analyze how the potentially inherent conflicts and contradictions of the cultural policy were enacted in these various mediated forms.