Cultural policy and the ‘enlightenment’ function of humanities research

Prof. Eleonora BelfioreCentre for Resesarch in Communication and CultureDepartment of Social SciencesLoughborough Universitye.belfiore@lboro.ac.uk @elebelfiore

Cultural Policy Observatory of Ireland Irish World Academy of Music and Dance,University of Limerick, 16th November 2016

‘Value’ from a cultural policy perspective

An interest in the politics of cultural policy making through the analysis of the discursive formation around justifications of public funding for the arts and culture The question of ‘making the case’ for the arts is fundamentally one of cultural value:

“There will never be enough money”.

“Choices will always have to be made, judgments-between”

(Richard Hoggart)

The problem of ‘justification’…

TomNightingale on the BBC Newsnight comment web page in 2008:

“There are strong cases for publicly funding street lighting, hospitals, schools and many other goods and services. What is the value of arts beyond private enjoyment. I, and many others, enjoy fish and chips. Should chippies be subsidised? A bag of fish and chips beats the pants off anything either Tracey Emin or Damien Hirst ever produced”.

The roots of ‘justification anxiety’

Welfare state under pressure Crisis of legitimacy of traditional cultural values (postmodern theory) Shift towards evidence-based policy and the audit societyMore recently, the fall-out of the 2008 crisis The difficulty of making a political case that can stand up to scrutiny and convince the public

The arts’ sector “attachment” to social and economic agendas:

arts as an engine for local and national economic development (the creative economy) arts as a tool to promote social inclusion, health & well-being

Justifying public arts funding in the 21st century

The latest cultural industries headlines…

Creative Industries worth £8million an hour to UK economy (DCMS 2014)

DCMS’s January 2016 Economic Estimates reveal that the UK’s creative economy is now worth £133.3bn – 8.2% of UK economy. DCMS’ Official employment statistics published June 2016: Growth of 25% since 2011at a rate faster than the whole of the UK economy (12.1%).Accounted for 1.9 million jobs in 2015, up 3.2% between 2014 and 2015

The impact measurement ‘fetish’

According to the LGA’s report Driving Growth Through Local Government Investment in the Arts (2013):

York Museum Trust “represents a ‘return on investment’ of around £10 of impact for every £1 invested by City of York Council”.

Socio-economic impact = An external form of validation and legitimacy.

But also a diversionary tactic

From AHRC’s Leading the World: The economic impact of UK arts and humanities research (2009):

… for every £1 spent on research by the AHRC, the nation may derive as much as £10 of immediate benefit and another £15-£20 of long-term benefit. Thus in 2006-7, the AHRC invested £60.3 million in new research, which implies immediate returns of over £616.9 million and a possible additional return over 25 years of around £1 billion.

The magic of the ‘put £1 in and get £10 back’ rhetoric

Impact, policy and ‘toolkit mania’

Political and controversial issues have been reformulated in technical termsPromotion of a linear model of the research/policy nexusAudit, evaluation and performance measurement = “rituals of verification” (Power 1997)The cult of the measurable as a strategy of legitimation and as a way to bypass the problem of the articulation of the ‘case for the arts’A sector that is uncomfortable about articulating its own valueWhat could humanities scholarship possibly have to contribute to the justification crusade?

The fundamental question (that remains undealt with):

‘… isn't the real challenge for cultural policy analysts and practitioners to identify the ways in which cultures can be funded, supported or created using the public purse in ways that are democratic and accountable? To support one person's or groups' culture is also to make a decision not to support another's; on what bases do we make these decisions?’

(Gibson 2008)

Arts policy: inherently political

Cultural value is socially constructed, negotiated and contested

“Understanding art as socially produced necessarily involves illuminating some of the ways in which various forms, genres, styles, etc. come to have value ascribed to them by certain groups in particular contexts” (Wolff 1981, 7).

This is where the Humanities (should) step in

The ‘enlightenment model’ of the

research/policy/practice nexusPublic policy scholar Carol Weiss and research

utilization scholarship – 1970s“government officials use research less to arrive at solutions than to orient themselves to problems”non-academic professional communities use research “to help them think about issues and define the problematics of a situation, to gain new ideas and new perspectives”that “much of this use is not deliberate, direct, and targeted, but a result of long-term percolation of social science concepts, theories, and findings into the climate of informed opinion”.

Examples of (potential) Enlightenment

Socially constructed nature of what we consider valuable culture – rooted in history, embedded in curricula and institutions.Power, culture and the politics of representation: how are we to assess the value of the creative industries (bringing ‘meaning’ into cultural policy debates)Reconfiguring key notions in cultural policy debates, e.g. ‘cultural participation’ through the UEP project, ‘community development’ through collaboration with Fun Palaces

Developing a ‘critical-historical approach’ to illuminate contemporary

political & policy issuesProblematizing ‘impact’Identification of three main strands within a complex intellectual history:

the positive intellectual traditionthe negative intellectual traditionthe autonomy of art tradition

Is the dichotomy between intrinsic/instrumental value helpful or part of the problem?‘Instrumentalism’ is in fact 2500 years old and always had a defensive character (to ‘make the case’ for the arts)

Cultural value: in the eye of the beholder

My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding – Channel 4 2011-3

Voted ‘Most Groundbreaking Programme’ at the Cultural Diversity Awards 2010

Series 1 was nominated for a BAFTA in the YouTube Audience Vote category

The ‘value’ of MBFGW 2012

Audience figures for Episode 1 series 2 of Big Fat Gypsy Weddings reached 9.2 million Firecracker also won ‘Best International Sale Award’ – a key industry accolade:The judges said the show had “made a significant mark on the international market, with some staggering deals”.

By then, BFGW had generated sales revenue of £3.5m from deals in 81 territories

The flipside…

‘stigmatization operates as a form of governance which legitimizes the reproduction and entrenchment of inequalities and injustices.’

Imogen Tyler (2013:8)

What can be done?

‘…to de-istitutionalize patterns of cultural value that impede parity of participation and to replace them with patterns that foster it. Redressing misrecognition now means changing the interaction-regulating values that impede parity of participation at all relevant institutional sites’ (Fraser 2000:115)

Should (cultural) policy play a part in trying to achieve this?

FS Michaels (2011) Monoculture: How one story is changing everything

“In these early decades of the twenty-first century, the master story is economic; economic beliefs, values and assumptions are shaping how we feel, think, and act. The beliefs, values and assumptions that make up the economic story aren’t inherently right or wrong; they’re just a single perspective on the nature of reality. In a monoculture though, that single perspective becomes so engrained as the only reasonable reality that we begin to forget our other stories, and fail to see the monoculture in its totality, never mind question it”.

Articulating value in the ‘monoculture’

The challenge:How to resist the equivalence of cultural value and economic value in the economic monoculture?The ‘rhetoric of no alternative’ and the neoliberal doxaBourdieu (1998) neo-liberalism = an ‘uncrossable horizon of thought’ = all-pervading form of economic fatalism, which is ‘becoming a sort of universal belief, a new ecumenical gospel’.

When market logic is transformed into “a universal common sense” (Bourdieu & Wacquant 2001), is there any space in public policy for values beyond economic value?

The Humanities should play a key role in this effort of ‘thinking otherwise’

Beyond advocacy: what role for academia?

The Warwick Commission on the Future of Cultural Value Challenging the myth of the neutrality of policy and the

linear research-policy nexus it presupposes Pushing the debate beyond the obsession with funding

(simile of the ecosystem) Feeding critical perspectives into policy debates + asking

the awkward questions We are all implicated in the socially stratified way in which

cultural value works, so this can only be a collaborative effort!

Asking ourselves, what comes after critique?