The Symbolic Economy
Malcolm Miles, Limits to Culture: Urban Regeneration Vs. Dissident Art
Pluto Press, 224pp, £19.99, ISBN 9780745334349
reviewed by Harry Stopes
Limits to Culture: Urban Regeneration vs Dissident Art begins with a discussion of urban change in the developed world in the last three decades. Drawing on the research of other scholars, Malcolm Miles examines de-industrialised cities such as Liverpool, Bilbao, and Barcelona, describing how an often piecemeal set of new developments, renovations and city branding projects, driven by private individuals, corporations and local and national governments, has transformed these places. Where 'successful' on the terms of those who promote it, this process involves the wholesale replacement of local populations with new, wealthier residents: it is of course familiar under the names of gentrification or regeneration. Miles, who is Professor of Cultural Theory at the University of Plymouth, is interested in the role of 'culture' – defined in this context as the versions of 'high' culture exhibited in galleries, rather than in the anthropological sense of the everyday – in these processes. In particular he examines the role of new cultural institutions opened in the last three decades. As such, this book is about both culture and the physical built environment of the city.
Miles notes that such re-orderings of the urban space have occurred alongside a general contraction of the possibilities afforded to people to use it as they like. Unwanted local populations, from skateboarders to sex workers, are likely to be surveilled, policed (by both state and private security) or designed out of the neighbourhood and forced elsewhere. Public space is increasingly privatised, a shift which is discussed in Anna Minton's Ground Control (2009). Missing in Miles' account is an acknowledgement of the racial dynamics often at play here, not only in gentrifying neighbourhoods in London or New York, but also Oakland and many other cities. Consuming culture on the South Bank is the right way to behave in the space, in the same way that skateboarding is not.
The use of culture as a tool of ‘soft-policing’ is not an innovation of the neoliberal era. In the 19th century art galleries functioned in part as a means of social control, supposed to model respectable behaviour to urban working classes and provide them with alternative healthy leisure habits. A similar paternalism is present in the postwar development of the Arts Council and the Festival of Britain, to which Miles dedicates part of a chapter. In this latter case he is too ready to excuse such paternalism because of its contextual association with the postwar welfare state, and because its ‘core aim was to improve the lot of ordinary citizens.’ In this sense Miles identifies a greater contrast between then and now than his analysis sustains.
Nevertheless, Miles argues, the contemporary moment is novel in that the new galleries and museums he describes are conceived and designed through the prism of their contribution to the economy. Cultural projects are celebrated for their capacity to increase local property prices and to spur further development. Unfortunately he does not consider why this shift has occurred. David Harvey, for example, has argued that property – both built and purchased with credit – was central to the recomposition of capitalism after the second world war. A reference to Harvey's work, or similar work on the same subject, would help to contextualise the argument. Such a discussion would also be useful during Miles' very effective demolition of Richard Florida's category of the ‘creative class,’ roughly speaking a shorthand for people who work in service industries and are educated to university level. That this population exists in large numbers in wealthy cities Florida mistakes for a cause rather than a symptom, on the basis of which he has convinced city governments across the world of the need to attract this group of people to the city. This is one way in which culture and urban development policies are made to serve an agenda which is economically determined. This Miles refers to as the ‘realign[ment of cultural policy] to the symbolic economies by which cities compete globally for investment and cultural tourism.’
The 'symbolic economy' is central to Miles' thesis in this book. The concept is frustratingly under-defined, but it seems to work in his analysis like a form of branding, influencing decisions about investment, particularly in the property market. This is useful in that, without excluding economics from the analysis, it reminds us that gentrification has an aesthetics that needs explaining. The capacity of new arrivals to pay higher rents obviously explains how gentrification actually happens, but it does not adequately explain why the (relatively) rich begin to think that central urban living is cool. Why, when their parents aspired to live in the suburbs, do twenty or thirty-somethings want to live in the city? Though Miles notes in the introduction that he can't provide the answers, he's asking the right questions at this point.
The book's second main thesis emerges from a remark by Peter Sloterdijk, which Miles quotes more than once. Sloterdijk writes that capitalism is ‘the project of placing the entire working life, wish life and expressive life of the people it affected within the immanence of spending power.’ Where once creativity was associated with dissent, Miles argues, it has become increasingly proximate to consumption. In the final two chapters he explores what a dissenting art might look like in this context and offers some examples, most interestingly the Liverpool-based collective Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home, founded by a young family at their council house in Everton. Mostly though what he finds is that the art exhibited in the new galleries re-inscribes this association between culture and consumption. Even projects requiring multiple performers or volunteers are hierarchical, with the artist as a kind of entrepreneur, directing proceedings.
This is a bold effort to bring together readings of two broad trends in contemporary society: the bending of culture to serve an economic agenda, particularly based around the remaking of the built environment; together with the importance of branding and the mediation of (almost) all forms of expression through the act of consumption. Miles shows the ways in which these processes are related, and while he doesn't bring any new research to that end, this book is a useful synthesis.
Miles notes that such re-orderings of the urban space have occurred alongside a general contraction of the possibilities afforded to people to use it as they like. Unwanted local populations, from skateboarders to sex workers, are likely to be surveilled, policed (by both state and private security) or designed out of the neighbourhood and forced elsewhere. Public space is increasingly privatised, a shift which is discussed in Anna Minton's Ground Control (2009). Missing in Miles' account is an acknowledgement of the racial dynamics often at play here, not only in gentrifying neighbourhoods in London or New York, but also Oakland and many other cities. Consuming culture on the South Bank is the right way to behave in the space, in the same way that skateboarding is not.
The use of culture as a tool of ‘soft-policing’ is not an innovation of the neoliberal era. In the 19th century art galleries functioned in part as a means of social control, supposed to model respectable behaviour to urban working classes and provide them with alternative healthy leisure habits. A similar paternalism is present in the postwar development of the Arts Council and the Festival of Britain, to which Miles dedicates part of a chapter. In this latter case he is too ready to excuse such paternalism because of its contextual association with the postwar welfare state, and because its ‘core aim was to improve the lot of ordinary citizens.’ In this sense Miles identifies a greater contrast between then and now than his analysis sustains.
Nevertheless, Miles argues, the contemporary moment is novel in that the new galleries and museums he describes are conceived and designed through the prism of their contribution to the economy. Cultural projects are celebrated for their capacity to increase local property prices and to spur further development. Unfortunately he does not consider why this shift has occurred. David Harvey, for example, has argued that property – both built and purchased with credit – was central to the recomposition of capitalism after the second world war. A reference to Harvey's work, or similar work on the same subject, would help to contextualise the argument. Such a discussion would also be useful during Miles' very effective demolition of Richard Florida's category of the ‘creative class,’ roughly speaking a shorthand for people who work in service industries and are educated to university level. That this population exists in large numbers in wealthy cities Florida mistakes for a cause rather than a symptom, on the basis of which he has convinced city governments across the world of the need to attract this group of people to the city. This is one way in which culture and urban development policies are made to serve an agenda which is economically determined. This Miles refers to as the ‘realign[ment of cultural policy] to the symbolic economies by which cities compete globally for investment and cultural tourism.’
The 'symbolic economy' is central to Miles' thesis in this book. The concept is frustratingly under-defined, but it seems to work in his analysis like a form of branding, influencing decisions about investment, particularly in the property market. This is useful in that, without excluding economics from the analysis, it reminds us that gentrification has an aesthetics that needs explaining. The capacity of new arrivals to pay higher rents obviously explains how gentrification actually happens, but it does not adequately explain why the (relatively) rich begin to think that central urban living is cool. Why, when their parents aspired to live in the suburbs, do twenty or thirty-somethings want to live in the city? Though Miles notes in the introduction that he can't provide the answers, he's asking the right questions at this point.
The book's second main thesis emerges from a remark by Peter Sloterdijk, which Miles quotes more than once. Sloterdijk writes that capitalism is ‘the project of placing the entire working life, wish life and expressive life of the people it affected within the immanence of spending power.’ Where once creativity was associated with dissent, Miles argues, it has become increasingly proximate to consumption. In the final two chapters he explores what a dissenting art might look like in this context and offers some examples, most interestingly the Liverpool-based collective Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home, founded by a young family at their council house in Everton. Mostly though what he finds is that the art exhibited in the new galleries re-inscribes this association between culture and consumption. Even projects requiring multiple performers or volunteers are hierarchical, with the artist as a kind of entrepreneur, directing proceedings.
This is a bold effort to bring together readings of two broad trends in contemporary society: the bending of culture to serve an economic agenda, particularly based around the remaking of the built environment; together with the importance of branding and the mediation of (almost) all forms of expression through the act of consumption. Miles shows the ways in which these processes are related, and while he doesn't bring any new research to that end, this book is a useful synthesis.