All entries for June 2012
June 14, 2012
Culture and Value
I have just attended the two day symposium ‘Cultural Value: developing the research agenda’, organized by colleague Eleonora Belfiore, held here at one of Warwick’s conference centres (11-12th). It was a highly interesting event, with a wide range of issues effecting every area of cultural policy research – from arts funding to mega-events to social engagement. I am not going to summarise the event here, which would take a long time. I will just make a few points, which impressed themselves on me in the course of the two days (with its five presentations).
The concept of value is particularly interesting, as it is one of those public policy concepts that has deep philosophical origins, and thus forces the public policy mind to be more reflexive about the language it uses (at least, we hope). In fact, one of the recurring themes of the symposium was the relation between cultural policy and the broader political terrain of public policy, and how the language of the former is determined by the political realpolitik of the latter. For example, I personally am frustrated by the way the crucial term ‘public value’ has been so eaten-up by new public management regime strategists that cultural thinkers now keep away from it. Yet the term ‘value’ is inherently public as it is inherently cultural (subject to changing behaviours of judgment, regimes of taste, meta-ethical activities of ascribing value and evaluation). Because of that, the work of cultural policy on value can perhaps inform public policy thinking in this area. Cultural value is one region that opens up the complex nature of public value per se in its social, cultural as well as economic dimensions. In this area, cultural policy thinking can be the reflexive conscience of public policy.
Two more themes that emerged from the symposium (at least for me….I was there as a virtual gatecrasher): (i) Dave O’Brien’s argument for an ethically-driven bureaucracy challenged certain assumptions on the Left that have become pervasive to the enterprise of cultural policy studies. It is true, that public bureaucracy (from government ministries, NDPBs, quangos and so on) are generally understood as the embodiment of instrumental rationality, and whose methods can only be antithetical to real cultural democracy (indeed, do I remember rightly in thinking the term ‘bureaucracy’ was first used in reference to the British colonial administration in Ireland?).
This is an interesting discussion that needs to continue – we need to excavate some of the lost narratives of critical modernity, where bureaucracy is the mark of a modern civil society (I think of Hegel, then Weber). If we take the founding moment of modernity as the categorical separation of state and civil society, then bureaucracy was ideally the mechanism of democratic mediation that, though sponsored by the state, did not act in its own ‘interests’ (theoretically, it should have none – quite uniquely). Idealist perhaps (and critical and elite theorists, regime theorists and others, would laugh at this of course). Yet given that wishing away the world of bureaucracy is not an option for cultural policy (is not cultural policy a bureaucratic invention?) maybe we need to re-frame our cultural policy understanding of all forms of public administration and do so through intellectual engagement.
(ii) Yet Andy Miles’s presentation would cause one to hesitate. The abstraction or decontextualisation of value from actual forms of social life is endemic to the bureaucratic management of culture. There are some chronic ironies in the public policy management of culture – they want culture both to be business and to participate in social/community development. Yet they refuse the conditions of risk and of social interaction/conflict/difference that make actual business and real social life possible. Miles’s talk suggested a return to the actual everyday social sphere, the realm of urban life, and learn from the values, language and articulations of the populace. For me, this entails a return of some of the defining issues of ‘urban cultural policy’ to mainstream cultural policy debates. National funding regimes by and large have a very abstract grip on the spatio-temporal and urban contexts of culture.
Jonathan Vickery
14 Jun 2012 11:39
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June 06, 2012
Creative Complexity
Creative Practice, Complexity and the Creative Economy Research Symposium, at Birmingham Business School on 31st May, 2012.
My only previous experience of complexity theory was a short seminar in Oxford’s Said Business School, largely run by ex-theoretical physicists. I probably understood less than a third of it. I did understand Ronald Barnett’s excellent book, Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity (1999), which here is a bit beside the point. Complexity theory itself is evidently now undergoing a ‘cultural turn’ and being used to investigate creative industry networks, clusters, social interaction and the collaborative dimension of creative and cultural production.Complexity theory generally attempts to look at phenomena in terms of multiple interactions, interdependencies and the dynamic process-based change within and between systems or organisms. The symposium was actually the last in a research project, and introduced by the main project leaders, Roberta Comunian, Caroline Chapain, and Katerina Alexiou. Every paper was strong, and comprised three strands of ‘networks’, ‘education’ and ‘design’.
What I relate to in complexity theory, despite many of the research methods used here are common to other frameworks (from cognitive mapping to interviews), is the need to consider the organizational formations and seemingly random and contingent process-based nature of creative production. It also demands more of researchers in terms of getting embedded or involved in cultural projects, and developing a dialogue between the theory-development and the more ethnographic data gathering. Each of the symposium papers I felt came from a position of experience, as well as knowledge, which made them more credible. In a way, the subject of this symposium highlights something within creative industries research that our Centre here at Warwick has been trying to do in cultural policy – making theory and practice ‘co-creative’, (to use a trendy term). In many approaches to creative economy research, there is too much placing of static theoretical templates onto the vast and hybrid terrain of empirical data that is ‘cultural production’. In fact, the term ‘production’ itself can be misleading. The so-called ‘creative economy’ often doesn’t come together as a coherent research object; it is not one ‘system’, and does not function according to hermetic organs of economic productivity. It comprises many dynamic spheres of production interconnected into other regions of economic life, but also ‘un’-productive and positively un-economically viable socio-urban life.
There was an awful lot of content to this symposium, which I can't begin to summarise here. I arrived at three conclusions: we need to differentiate between different forms of complexity outside regulative concepts like ‘production’ (which demands an ordering of data according to certain economic presuppositions);we also need to distinguish between the complexity generated by the creative process and the complexity of such activities negotiating extraneous system-regimes (social, financial, institutional), and thus gauge the relativity of 'necessity-contingency' as it changes from place to place or activity to activity. Third: how does complexity in creative activity offer the appearance of diversity and endless possibility, but is however directed by fairly consistent regimes of power, particularly it seems in the closed expert networks that seem to come up with the most well-publicised achievements.
To find out more about the project:
http://www.complexity-creative-economy.net/index.html
Jonathan Vickery
06 Jun 2012 14:00
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