The thesis argues that the relations between culture and government are best viewed through an analysis of the programmatic and institutional contexts for the use of culture as an interface in the relations between citizenship and government. Discussion takes place through an analysis of the history of art programmes which, in seeking to target a 'general' population, have attempted to equip this population with various particular capacities. We aim to provide a history of rationalities of art administration. This will provide us with an approach through which we might understand some of the seemingly irreconcilable policy discourses which characterise contemporary discussion of government arts funding. Research for this thesis aims to make a contribution to historical research on arts institutions in Australia and provide a base from which to think about the role of government in culture in contemporary Australia. In order to reflect on the relations between government and culture the thesis discusses the key rationales for the conjunction of art, citizenship and government in post-World War Two (WWII) Australia to the present day. Thus, the thesis aims to contribute an overview of the discursive origins of the main contemporary rationales framing arts subvention in post-WWII Australia. The relations involved in the government of culture in late eighteenth-century France, nineteenth-century Britain, America in the 1930s and Britain during WWII are examined by way of arguing that the discursive influences on government cultural policy in Australia have been diverse. It is suggested in relation to present day Australian cultural policy that more effective terms of engagement with policy imperatives might be found in a history of the funding of culture which emphasises the plurality of relations between governmental programmes and the self-shaping activities of citizens. During this century there has been a shift in the political rationality which organises government in modern Western liberal democracies. The historical case studies which form section two of the thesis enable us to argue that, since WWII, cultural programmes have been increasingly deployed on the basis of a governmental rationality that can be described as advanced or neo-liberal. This is both in relation to the forms these programmes have taken and in relation to the character of the forms of conduct such programmes have sought to shape in the populations they act upon. Mechanisms characteristic of such neo-liberal forms of government are those associated with the welfare state and include cultural programmes. Analysis of governmental programmes using such conceptual tools allows us to interpret problems of modern social democratic government less in terms of oppositions between structure and agency and more in terms of the strategies and techniques of government which shape the activities of citizens. Thus, the thesis will approach the field of cultural management not as a field of monolithic decision making but as a domain in which there are a multiplicity of power effects, knowledges, and tactics, which react to, or are based upon, the management of the population through culture. The thesis consists of two sections. Section one serves primarily to establish a set of historical and theoretical co-ordinates on which the more detailed historical work of the thesis in section two will be based. We conclude by emphasising the necessity for the continuation of a mix of policy frameworks in the construction of the relations between art, government and citizenship which will encompass a focus on diverse and sometimes competing policy goals.

Cultural policy studies, or studies in the relations of government and culture (Mercer, 1994) were initiated in Australia in the 1980s, where cultural studies have been reinterpreted into a dialogue of policy-making and cooperation between the government and academia (Cunningham, 1994; Hunter, 1993/1994; Molloy, 1994; Santamaria, 1994). This Australian-pioneered "cultural policy moment" (Cunningham 1994; Hawkins, 1994) thus provides an epistemological starting point for an analysis of cultural policy developments in South Africa, especially after 1994. Early South African cultural policy studies tend to draw from the Australian experience (Tomaselli and Shepperson, 1996). It must be noted that in terms of South African film policy analysis, there have been two cultural policy moments, one that addresses film post World War II to 1991, a period that is generally characterised as a "cinema of apartheid" (Tomaselli, 1989). This period is indebted to the seminal work of Keyan Tomaselli and Martin Botha. The second cultural policy moment begins in 1991 and continues to the present. It is this "moment" that informs the research and critical focus of the ways in which cultural studies in South Africa have modified the foundation of its critical position towards the state in response to developments since 1990. The aim of this thesis is to critically examine the ways in which South African cultural studies have responded to the Australian "cultural policy moment" in terms of academic-state relations, and the impact of discussions that were engaged in by various film organisations on film policy after 1990, and which resulted in the written proposals on film submitted to the Arts and Culture Task Group in 1994 and 1995. The Arts and Culture Task Group was the case study within which the notion of cultural policy was studied, along with the White Paper on Film. This thesis draws on and applies a variety of methods: firstly, there is the participatory research: I was employed by ACTAG to undertake research into film policy. My own experience of the process in which I worked very closely with the film sub-committee provides an "insider" account of assumptions, conflicts, practices and how outcomes were reached. I was also designated, along with Professor Tomaselli and Dr Botha, as one of the co-authors of the White Paper, and was thus part of the process of revising the ACTAG recommendations into draft legislation. Secondly, there is the method of comparative study: this thesis initially draws on the Australian cultural studies and film policy on the one hand, and South African cultural studies and film policy on the other. It then evolves into a critique of the "cultural policy moment" (Cunningham, 1994; Hawkins, 1994) as it related to the development of South African film policy between 1991 and 1997. Lastly, there was the empirical investigation: ACTAG, which was established to counsel Dr Ben Ngubane on the formulation of policy for the newly established government (see Chapter Four of this thesis, and see Karam, 1996), served as a case study. The final ACTAG document resulted in a reformulated arts and culture dispensation consistent with the new Constitution. This process in turn led to the origination and publication of the Government of National Unity's White Paper on Film in May 1996. Incorporated into this analysis was an "information trawl" (Given, 1994; Mercer, 1994 and Santamaria, 1994) of prior and extant policy frameworks and assumptions of various film, cultural and media organizations formulated during the period under review. The link between film and culture, and hence film and cultural policy, emerges from the following two commonplace associations: firstly, that film as a form of visual creation is therefore a form of art; and secondly, that the concepts of art and culture are inextricably connected. What drives the present debate is the Australian appropriations of Raymond Williams's description of culture as "a whole way of life". This, while validly dissolving the early-twentieth century identification of culture with "high" or "canonical" forms of traditional literature, sculpture, or painting, none the less leaves theorists with a "distinct fuzziness" (Johnson, 1979) as to what the term "culture" actually denotes. Australian policy studies' approaches tend to focus on culture as personifying a structure of "livability" under terms of employment, environmental concerns, and urban planning (Cunningham, 1994; Hawkins, 1994). In general, however, the focus has only attained any concrete outcomes when research has resuscitated precisely the link between culture and the arts, thereby drawing on the old polemics of "high" versus "low" and "popular" culture. The individual chapters cover the following topics: the Introductory Chapter provides a general historical overview of the South African film subsidization system, a crucial element of the analytical framework, from its inception in 1956 to it's dissolvement in the 1980s; Chapter Two, "Cultural Policy" deals with the origination and development of the concept of "cultural policy"; Chapter Three focuses on the Australian "cultural policy moment" and it's application to film; Chapters Four and Five deal with the ACTAG Film Sub-committee and the White Paper on Film respectively; and the last chapter, Chapter Six critiques these processes and their resulting documents, as case studies, from a cultural policy standpoint. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1997.