Limits to Culture: Urban Regeneration vs. Dissident Art

Limits to Culture

Limits to Culture

Urban Regeneration vs. Dissident Art

Malcolm Miles

First published 2015 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Malcolm Miles 2015

The right of Malcolm Miles to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

List of Illustrations

All images are the author’s unless otherwise stated

Introduction

This is a book about how culture has become a mask of social ordering under neoliberalism, and about some of the dissenting practices that have emerged in the past few years against that trend or as alternatives to it.

Despite claims to the contrary, culturally led urban redevelopment does not bring the social or economic regeneration of communities, and is not a means to social inclusion so much as a relatively low-cost way to address failures in other policy areas. New art museums are said to generate employment and attract cultural tourism or investment, and a few spectacular cases – Barcelona and Bilbao – are quoted; but conditions differ from one place to another, so that a model is unlikely to be replicated (while the benefits are disputed in supposedly successful cases). I have nothing against public investment in cultural resources, which is preferable to spending on military adventures, bailing out private-sector banks, or building new roads; but I ask more from spending on the arts than support for property redevelopment, and am not persuaded that the arts drive urban renewal (in the sense of regenerating local economies and communities). In some cases there might be benefits but these tend to be unevenly distributed and often the impact is gentrification. Anyway, the game is up.

After the 2007–08 crisis in global financial services, and austerity, money for the arts has decreased while governments have become out-sourced providers of governmental services to transnational corporations. If the project of capital is the total containment of all elements of life in profit mechanisms, culture is part of its soft policing. If that seems bleak or cynical, culture’s co-option to the regime of globalisation follows its function in liberal improvement in the nineteenth century, when new art museums opened access to high culture to the lower classes as a means to greater productivity and social stability. In the past few decades, public art, cultural quarters and flagship cultural institutions have become further means of ordering, now in service of property development.

In brief, culture has been co-opted to redevelopment in service, not of local needs, but of the symbolic economies by which cities compete globally. Within the new, immaterial economy, art fits well enough with rebranding. In London in the 2000s, the Millennium Dome and Tate Modern were flagships of the rebranding of Britain as Cool Britannia, although contrasting in their capacity to deliver the smoke-and-mirrors effect. Since the crash, what has emerged as a distinct redevelopment sector has allowed the cultural mask to slip; schemes are overtly seen as urban clearances designed to move the poor and unproductive to the geographical as well as the social and economic margins. In place of inner cities, now, urban villages cater for the dwelling and consumption needs of young professionals in the new economy, defined, in one rather dubious analysis, as a ‘creative class’.

A number of tendencies and trajectories merge, collide or slip into entropy. The civic values which were a modern outcome of nineteenth-century liberal reformism gave way in the 1980s to managerialism, which transmuted into an imperative to consume, and a totalitarian denial of alternatives. Against this, dissident art has a role of resisting the erasure of the alternative imaginaries which might one day be realised as a better world. The work of art collectives is discussed in the book’s later chapters, and gives me hope for change of some kind, although real political change (at least through representational systems) is unlikely at present.

Occupy showed, in the winter of 2011–12, that direct democracy is possible if ephemeral. If another kind of politics has emerged then there might at some point be another kind of cultural work as antidote to affirmative culture and the affluent society. Nonetheless, the book ends on an ambivalent note, reflecting on an incidental occurrence outside art, but no less cultural. Well, I do not work in the Answers Department at the university: my job is more reframing the questions.

Two sources

The title, Limits to Culture, echoes Limits to Medicine by Ivan Illich. With Herbert Marcuse and André Gorz, Illich was a contributor to the radical Left in the 1960s and 1970s, looking beyond the affluent society towards a liberation of consciousness. In De-schooling Society,¹ Illich argued that formal education restricts a potential for experiential learning while the institutionalisation of learning signifies a general institutionalisation of life. This could be compared to the radical, vernacular, living-based pedagogy proposed by Paolo Freire;² and prefigures an emphasis on direct democracy in radical movements. In Limits to Medicine, Illich argued that society had become medicalised to the detriment of health but in service of productivity: ‘The medicalisation of industrial society brings its imperialistic character to ultimate fruition.’³ Illich also observed that an excessive fear of mortality characteristic of society’s medicalisation occurred when, ‘megadeath came upon the scene’ in the form of nuclear weapons.⁴ Like Marcuse and Gorz, Illich aligned each issue to a world order – which Marcuse called the affluent society⁵ – which restricts a human urge to liberation not merely by default but instrumentally. Culture might then be a means to freedom, able to evade the dominant state of self-coercion and political repression: ‘Body-sense is experienced as an ever-renewed gift of culture.… Cultured health is bounded by each society’s style in the art of living.’⁶

I want to juxtapose Illich’s writing from the era of protest and intentional communities with Peter Sloterdijk’s In the World Interior of Capital. If Marcuse and Illich pointed to a new totalitarianism of capital which was as oppressive as the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union, I think Sloterdijk deepens the argument historically by locating the beginning of globalisation literally in the invention of the globe and the voyages of colonisation of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Hence a universal system enabled the total sight of the world, but the story does not end with an all-seeing gaze; it leads to a total economic system, or globalised capitalism, which assimilates every human and natural phenomenon. That is, what began as a quest for exploitation has become a total imperative to consume, and to do so in ways which entrench the underlying value-system. Sloterdijk writes,

As for capitalism, we can only now say that it always meant more than the relations of production; its shaping power had always gone much further than can be encapsulated in the thought figure of the ‘global market’. It implies the project of placing the entire working life, wish life, and expressive life of the people it affected within the immanence of spending power.⁷

The implication here is that cities are (re)produced by this mechanism. A specific outcome is, I argue, the co-option of culture and urban spaces to the trajectory of capital. The end of that trajectory is wealth accumulation by an elite whose power is political-economic, as the state declines as fabled protector of the common wealth (or well-being). Culture, in the form of culturally led urban redevelopment, lends an aura of universal benefit to the property market, and recodes space as elite zones producing new margins outside them.

In German Idealism, the end of history was the attainment of Reason. In the late twentieth century, it was announced that history was over: the market had triumphed and there was no alternative. Furthermore, the so-called free market was said to be self-correcting. After the 2007 crash and exposure of casino-capitalism this has become untenable: the market does not correct itself, and is evidently irrational. In parallel, the culture of urban redevelopment schemes (or the cultural sector generally) tends towards a version of high culture adapted to new elites in the immaterial economy; it differs from the anthropological sense of cultures as shared articulations and expressions of meanings and values in ordinary lives. This translates, in this book, into a contrast between the cultural apparatus of redevelopment and the efforts of artists and artist-collectives to develop a range of cultural practices both embedded in their social situations and, at the same time, at a critical distance from consumerist culture.

My conjecture is more modest than Sloterdijk’s although, like him, I am a theorist not an empiricist; I am not a social scientist and do not do data; nor do I have any talent for fieldwork (I don’t like meeting people I don’t know); but if that puts me in a historicist milieu, I am also English, not given to Wagnerian flights of text, and probably out of my depth when dealing with world-historical meta-narratives. In that context, the trajectory which I propose in this book connects nineteenth-century urban improvements to today’s culturally led urban redevelopment as a means of control, sets out a counter-culture, and does that mainly through the evidence and arguments of published research. If I make a contribution it is in making new connections between the ideas and findings published in different, disparate literatures.

The book

In Chapter 1 I set the scene, critically contextualising the cultural turn of the 1980s–1990s in a de-industrialised estate. I look at iconic cases of culturally led redevelopment, the recoding of sites as cultural zones, the demarcation of cultural quarters and insertion of new flagship cultural venues in the wastes left by de-industrialisation. Chapter 2 examines the notion of a cultural class, questioning the use of the category but accepting a link between culturally led redevelopment and gentrification as the lifestyle associated with the professionals in the new economy of immaterial production taken as driving the process. Then, Chapter 3 looks back to expressions of civic values and ideas of national identity at the Festival of Britain in 1951, and compares the festival to celebrations of its 60th anniversary in 2011, and to the failure of the Millennium Dome in 2000. This is not a plea for a return to a lost world, because clocks do not run backwards, but raises questions as to what place civic or shared values have now or might have in new ways one day.

Chapter 4 is shorter and constitutes an experiential, at times journalistic, interlude; I record impressions formed of some of the new art museums around England funded mainly by the National Lottery, which I visited in March 2014. But I offer some contextual material from critical museology, as well. Chapter 5 resumes the critical discourse, moving to a historical perspective: an expansion of public museums (such as the Tate Gallery, opened in 1897) in the nineteenth century is aligned with fear of social unrest, after what seemed to be an opening of cultural events to new publics in Georgian London but which, on investigation, reproduces social divisions in a time of rapidly expanding wealth. Chapter 6 maps the book’s arguments onto public spaces, seen in the 1990s as enabling social mixing and social cohesion, and asks to what extent urban redevelopment actually conceals a democratic deficit, and whether new ideas and tactics for social change really occur in public spaces which were designed for the display of power, or elsewhere, otherwise.

This leads me to the work of artists and artist-collectives whose practices I read as dissident, or at least as outside the strictures of redevelopment; and to alternatives modes of producing urban space. This begins at the end of Chapter 6 and is the substance of Chapter 7. It is not for me to say what artists should do but I try to summarise what I think they have done. The cases cited in Chapters 6 and 7 follow contact with artists and artists’ groups. Where possible I have sent them drafts for comment.

At the end, Chapter 8 is a short reflection on whether art has a role in social change after Occupy, which I read as an instance of the direct production of a new society. I ask how cultural work finds paths outside the institutional structures by which it has been drawn into market economics, and whether aesthetics retains a possibility for dissent. Is Beauty radically other? Can art break the institutional ties of Culture? I don’t know.

1

Cultural Turns: A De-industrialised Estate

The strangeness of cities becomes familiar. Perhaps it began in the 1900s, with the frenetic ambience of electric light and tramcars, and the crowds which thronged metropolitan cities. But this was an optimistic world, soon to be fractured by an industrialised war that would redraw the map of Europe. In the inter-war years, European cities became sites of democracy as well as technology, and of growing diversity through migration. The whole continent was devastated again, with the bombing of civilian targets to an unprecedented extent, before a sense of renewed civic values and humanism prevailed in the post-war era. There was austerity, and bomb sites remained; yet there was a renewed hope in the 1950s and economic expansion in the 1960s, culminating in the prospect of really changing the world in May 1968. That failed. Europe, and the rest of the world, has moved politically to the Right and economically to free market irrationality ever since. It sometimes seems as if the project of Enlightenment became tenuous in the 1930s and 1940s but has finally been encapsulated in an unrecoverable past in today’s neoliberal realm of de-industrialisation: a new wasteland characterised by corporate greed, human rights abuses and environmental destruction. If there is a post-industrial state of mind, it is produced by an economic system but as much enhanced by design. The steel and glass corporate towers, non-places of travel, labyrinthine malls and new art museums in cool industrial sheds amid signs of gentrification, all contribute to a new, post-Enlightenment sense of the sublime. It is characterised by both scale and visual language: the 800,000 square metre Euralille and the 20-hectare CCTV building in Beijing, for instance, both designed by Rem Koolhaas, are daunting;¹ and the steel, glass and pale grey cladding of post-industrial urban sheds and towers creates an other-worldly coldness, a feeling of alienation which is as much a source of awe as the Alps were for eighteenth-century travellers on the grand tour.

The new centres in their shiny splendour produce new margins. What was ordinary becomes marginal and residual. Contrasts deepen, real or imagined barriers emerge. Cities split. Owen Hatherley describes the redevelopment of Salford in Greater Manchester as generating a new, ‘dead centre’ in this enclave of wholesale reconstruction, entered from one side by an elegant bridge designed by Santiago Calatrava but from the other by bleak dual carriageways, dreary retail parks and old office complexes in down-at-heel Trafford.² Salford houses two flagship museums, the Lowry and a branch of the Imperial War Museum, and Media City, where parts of the BBC have moved. Walking in Salford Quays, Hatherley co-opts the weather:

Looking out through torrential rain … at this, the most famous part of the most successfully regenerated ex-industrial metropolis, we can’t help but wonder; is this as good as it gets? Museums, cheap speculative housing, offices for financially dysfunctional banks? What of the idea that civic pride might mean a civic architecture … ?³

Yes, but civic pride is a nineteenth-century value, the last flowering of which occurred in the 1950s (as in the Festival of Britain). These towers contain rather than house their occupants, as cheap housing warehouses the poor; and Hatherley imagines, ‘barricading oneself into a hermetically sealed, impeccably furnished prison against an outside world … assumed to be terrifying’.⁴ As digital communications systems link the enclaves of the immaterial economy of financial services, media and public relations along never-closing electronic highways, the city becomes a sleepless world where humans operate in systems more extensive than their imaginations. Sleep is, in any case, according to art theorist Jonathan Crary, no use, ‘given the immensity of what is at stake economically’.⁵ Manchester is a city which never sleeps, or which cannot because the night-economy of alcohol and clubs is as important as its day-time commerce. Permanent consumption compensates the operatives of late capitalism for routine alienation; it is the only game in town, the sole (if soulless) remaining imperative, enforced by the soft policing of the news-entertainment-culture sector.

Time!

If Slavoj Žižek is accurate when he says that these are the end-times,⁶ the question is what is ending. Perhaps it is modernity and the values it espoused of freedom and human happiness. In the nineteenth century, this was translated into efforts to ameliorate the material conditions of the poor; the improvements – sewers, clean water, housing – were genuine, and culture in the form of new public art museums was one of them, but the strategy was always repressive: the prevention of revolt. Since the 1980s, culture has been co-opted to urban redevelopment, first as public art – since institutionalised to the point of offering a choice between bland new public monuments, corporate logos or visual pollution – then as the participation of artists in the design of environments (from over-designed parks and piazzas to wobbly bridges) and of publics in projects aimed at dealing with the new category of social exclusion. Following the 2007 financial services crisis (the crash) the regeneration industry has emerged in a more brutal guise, looking less to culture for an aura of respectability as it gets on with postcode clearances.

Meanwhile Beauty is radically other to the world produced by capital.⁷ Like art’s uselessness, or the autonomy claimed for modernism, Beauty is not productive but convulsive. It is met in unexpected moments and encounters which fade before they can be grasped, yet lingers in the mind, and is not at all confined to art. Beauty fractures capital’s routines, breaking the chains of consumer culture in the awareness, suddenly, of ‘the incommensurability of the voice of poetry’.⁸ And the moment, however ephemeral, is transformative.⁹

To speak of such moments is utopian, and always has been. But utopianism was the content of modernism, which became (at some point in the late twentieth century) encapsulated in a no longer accessible (hence mystified) past. Art historian Tim Clark argues that modernism and socialism ended at the same time: ‘If they died together, does that mean that … they lived together, in century-long co-dependency?’¹⁰ I must leave that for another book, saying here only that globalisation renders both modernism and socialism as obsolete as old wireless sets.

Globalisation concentrates capital in companies which appropriate powers previously vested in states, and produces super-elites. When national regulation is an obstacle, companies go to transnational bodies; the super-rich enjoy unlimited mobility and avoid the inconvenience of paying tax. For sociologist Martin Albrow, no single sovereign power can claim ‘legitimate authority’ over transnational institutions, so that the ‘decentred and delinked’ structures of the new world order become a ‘vacant discursive space’ where, ‘people refer to the globe as once they referred to the nation, hence globalism’.¹¹ Zygmunt Bauman writes that, as states are ‘no longer capable of balancing the books’, they become instead ‘executors and plenipotentiaries of forces which they have no hope of controlling politically’.¹² Peter Sloterdijk reads capital as aiming to put ‘working life, wish life and expressive life … [all] within the immanence of spending power’.¹³ In this context, some of the systems employed by global capital reproduce the practices of the eighteenth century: journalist James Ridgeway reports that: ‘Children are traded in large numbers … [as] a source of low-cost labour’ in the sex industry.¹⁴ The global oil industry looks to Arctic exploration now that burning fossil fuels has melted much of the ice, just as colonialists previously pillaged rainforests. After 9/11, an older pattern of private security has been revived, and Naomi Klein writes of ‘the Bush team’ devising a role for government, in which the job of the state is, ‘not to provide security but to purchase it at market prices’,¹⁵ Again, design plays its part in the production of a fear which serves the security sector, which has little connection with genuine safety. And design is central to the gleaming images which