💾 Archived View for gemini.spam.works › mirrors › textfiles › politics › SPUNK › sp000025.txt captured on 2022-04-29 at 02:16:31.
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-03-01)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
CULTURE AS CIRCUS
Radical politics saw revolution as festival, a break with the existing state
of things in which all would recognise and act on their desires. The notion
of festival returned in the 1980s politics of social containment. The decade
was punctuated by a series of administratively-organised events, such as the
Garden Festivals. These purported to offer a community the chance to "find
itself" by re-orienting around the promise of a new enterprising self-image.
The prime example of this strategy as a remedy for social unrest was the
Liverpool Garden Festival. The promise that the developed festival site would
be a base for the city's regeneration was unfulfilled, but that became clear
only after attention shifted elsewhere.
Glasgow's administration was eager to attract that attention. The city had
long been controlled by the Labour Party, who modernised the city by
decanting people to peripheral public housing schemes and driving motorways
through the city central area (see "The Material Community" in H&N no.2).
This having visibly failed, the administration then embraced such 1980s
innovations as the new-logotype, mission-statement programme by which
bureaucracies simulate enterprising service to "their" local client
communities.
Whereas market theorists see enterprise in the transactions of sovereign
producers and consumers, this programme sees it in the actions of charismatic
administrative bureaucrats.
Such groups seek to maximise the resources under their control, and therefore
grasped an opportunity to operate the Garden Festival franchise for a year.
Limited publicity about the failings of the Liverpool event had little effect
on the Glasgow Garden Festival in 1988. Nor did revelations of the
public/private land deals which accompanied the development of the Glasgow
site have any real impact. The significant encounters in such a festival do
not involve the public but are between the private and public institutions
(District Council and Scottish Development Agency). The Garden Festival's
containment within a particular arena meant that it would be approached on
its own terms or not at all. Without ground for an opposition to develop, the
event was left to the public relations boosters.
The Garden Festival idea proposes that an urban post-industrial wasteland can
be restored to usefulness by a programme of land clearance, building and
strategic placing of transplanted shrubbery. Before the Glasgow Garden
Festival had taken place, plans were already under way for a more audacious
transplantation exercise: the 1990 European City of Culture designation.
The "City of Culture" concept offers a near blank sheet, allowing the
administrators to make their dreams a reality. A blow on the trumpet and the
walls can be brought tumbling down: A city-wide, year-long festival! The
brightest flowers money can buy (Sinatra, Pavarotti, Bolshoi)! A true Culture
City: at its core, an exhibition re-presenting (and hence sanitising) the
city's history to its citizens; around the centre, a events programme to
gladden listings magazine readers; and spreading out to the periphery, a
programme of "community events". And right in the middle of the year,
Glasgow's Big Day: typical of those sentimental, big gesture extravaganzas
loved by the Liberal-Left since Live Aid. All in all, the organisers excelled
themselves.
An opposition began to coalesce early. Some artists and writers implicity
boycotted the Year of Culture, recognising that participation involved
accepting the administrators as mediators of taste. More publicly the
"Workers City" book (published in 1988) defended Glasgow as "the working
class city par excellence" whose "true voice and experience" was being
ignored. Under normal circumstances, that would have been that. But the Year
of Culture package began to come apart.
Management of any modern public space demands discreet policing of behavioral
norms specified for each group of users. For example, a shopping mall
designates delivery areas, staff areas, and "public" meeting places which are
really private space patrolled by security men. Infringement of the norms,
whether by swearing, scuffling unemployed youth or by shop workers in
dispute, immediately brings expulsion to the outside.
The Garden Festival conformed to that model. But by extending the Culture
City festival site across the whole city, the administrators lost managerial
control. Without it, points of conflict began to appear. The grafting of the
festival apparatus onto existing local service hierarchies generated the
year's most significant conflict, the "Elsbeth King Affair". That then
nourished a dispute over the control of public land, which raised questions
of the limitations on democratic administrative fiat and produced simulacra
of accountability mechanisms (public meetings, referenda, public opinion
polls). And the year ended with the city's council leader, Baillie Pat Lally,
demonstrating his ability to make decisions with only the semblance of
democratic checks and balances (the mural affair).
What interest can there be in such a list of scandals hardly mentioned in
national newspapers, let alone internationally? Does it represent only parish
pump politicking? A closer look at the main features of these affairs may
demonstrate how competing sets of values can throw a system into confusion.
The "Elsbeth King Affair" was rooted in disputes within Glasgow District
Council's Museums and Art Galleries Department, disputes about job gradings
and about the importance attached to the city's "social history" museums. Ms.
King, the curator of the Peoples' Palace and her deputy Michael Donnelly had
a long-standing committment to these museums, one which was bound to come
into conflict with the twee concoction of "The Words and the Stones" (later
renamed Glasgow's Glasgow), a Year of Culture exhibition proposed from
outwith the department.
King was an early critic of that exhibition (now acknowledged as a disaster),
especially as it would divert resources from the Peoples' Palace. However, a
dispute over job grading had been simmering for some time and the
damage-limitation negotiations on rescuing "Glasgow's Glasgow" merged into
that grading bargaining. King wrote to her boss, Julian Spalding: "The least
I require in return is a recognition of departmental status for social
history, my immediate appointment as keeper and Michael Donnelly's
appointment as depute keeper." These negotiations failed, Glasgow's Glasgow
flopped, and, in a move widely interpreted as Spalding's revenge, a new
senior post later went instead to a former deputy, Mark O'Neill.
Administrative rationality requires a belief that "we're all in it together".
King had contravened that assumption by trading-off terms for rescuing
Glasgow's Glasgow. That indicated a threat to "proper" managerial control.
Any hierarchy, faced with a "problem" individual who combines expertise with
positional authority, has the imperative that these should be split, even, if
need be, at the expense of dispensing with that individual altogether. From a
bureaucratic viewpoint the Spalding-King dispute required the filling of the
vacant post in charge of Social History. Only then could normal business be
resumed.
But a feeling that King had been shabbily treated led to hundreds of protest
letters on the pages of the Glasgow Herald, notably the Letter of the 63
(local and national cultural celebrities). The debate was conducted within
"socialism". To one side, New Realist Labourism from the
corporatist-modernists whose desire to be enterprising brings a gullibility
prone to exploitation by passing visionary hucksters (as noted in H&N6). On
the other side, an alliance formed. Sentimentalists of politics (keepers of
sacred names) and of ways of life (curatorial taxidermists), both regarding
New Realist Labourism as betrayal, came together with people who reject
Labourism and instead uphold "the tradition of working-class people refusing
to be passive and mute, cowed victims of the political bureaucracy". Workers
City became the focal point for that opposition, on a common ground seeing
Labourism as betrayal of the working class rather than as the project of a
bureaucratic-administrative class.
The extent to which opposition involved taking one side in a dispute within
the bureaucracy was the campaign's strength and weakness. Much of the
opposition mapped friend-foe relations onto competing parts of the
administration. At worst, this was crude nationalism: Spalding-King-O'Neill;
English-Scots-Irish; Bad-Good-Bad. Straight-talking, ex-socialist columnists
could stand aside from the opposition by declaring that support for
individuals' career aspirations had never been part of socialism.
The bureaucracy over-reacted to the opposition with ferocity. Opponents were
denounced as "well-heeled authors and critics who refuse to dirty their
hands", mere "saloon-bar Stalinists" - in sum, "an embarrassment to this city
and all of its cultural workforce". In the grand tradition, class positions
and interests were erased and redrawn by the bureaucracy, which again
proclaimed itself the universal class.
However the Festivals Unit's glorification of the "cultural workforce" opened
cultural issues which would subvert their own specialist positions. As David
Kemp commented: "Is it now the fact that a city with a 'cultural workforce'
can now ignore its own 'culture' ? and that a safe, packaged, bland,
internationally-acceptable 'culture' will be provided for us by the 'cultural
workforce' who now travel the world searching for art and theatre in ever
more far-flung and exotic locations?"
Lally, presumably seeing himself in the tradition of municipal "good works",
was out of his depth, following his experts' advice. They'd bring the best,
no doubt, and International Culture fits that bill. In the socialist
twilight, public and private sponsorship look, feel and taste the same.
Labour once claimed to be a better distributor of bread, but will now settle
for circuses. The Year of Culture showed the shape of things to come, as can
be seen from the recent advertisement of permanent top jobs for the city's
"cultural workers" (as salaries of ?35,000-?45,000).
The Left's long-term failure to aspire to anything other than the cultural
status quo leaves no doubt that bringing Pavarotti, the Bolshoi and Sinatra
to the city was enough. And the mass self-celebration of the Big Day or of
the candle procession (organised by specialists from the one-time alterative
society) reinforce belief in a democracy of opportunity enabled by the
experts. Perplexity and frustration result when others don't share those
sentimental values.
The King affair was a catalyst. Its overspill into Donnelly's sacking for
speaking to the press (something not entirely unknown to the Festival
administrators), reversed the polarity of the workforce issue. A temporary
workforce of carpetbaggers was supported against permanent workers; appeals
against unfair dismissal were dismissed by tribunals of Labour councillors
sitting in the bosses' chairs.
The proposed long-term lease of the Fleshers Haugh public land on Glasgow
Green was an associated issue. Its proximity to the Peoples' Palace itself
and the historic associations of the public land on the Green meant that the
heritage issue now transcended the tawdry representations of the Glasgow's
Glasgow exhibition and the relabelling of streets bearing plantation-owners'
names as the Merchant City. Reacting to a surge of opposition (in contrast to
the disregard of the Garden Festival land deals), the administration conjured
up the democratic ghost. They organised public meetings to simulate a
consultation to legitimise their dealings. That failed, so they turned to
surveys and local newspaper referenda - still hoping to impose their will.
Deployment of these devices delegitimised the administration to an extent
that their plans had to be shelved.
The closing months of the Year of Culture were no better for the
administration. The solid and lasting achievement of the Year was to be the
new Concert Hall. Again, Lally was on the defensive, overreacting even to
criticism of the hall's acoustics. But his greater achievement was to
demonstrate the fallacy of all theories of democratic accountability by
rejecting Ian MacCullough's foyer painting (commissioned by the overlapping
Strathclyde Regional Council bureaucracy) at the Hall's opening ceremony.
This again gave rise to set-piece protest concerning "the artist's right to
self-expression" while omitting debate on the whole commission / patronage
system. But gusts of the usual modern art philistinism came from the Press,
which, as usual was incapable of perceiving real issues. In another time and
place, the Sunday Times plainspeakers could be expected to have congratulated
Stalin on his attack on Shostakovich.
Most of Scotland's Press shares the administration's mix of distaste and
sentimentality. The media sought "balance" on the issues by turning to
academics who could discuss the extent of the benefit of economic
"trickle-down" from increased tourism, etc.
The opposition was neither a mass campaign nor a campaign by elite experts,
but something in between. So the Press increasingly mentioned dissenters
(usually named as Workers City) but it almost had a samisztat presence. As
indicated by some contributions to the second Workers' City book, "The
Reckoning", there was a reluctance to delegate speech to spokespeople to
"represent" general grievance. Some prominent opponents refused to speak to
the press, but others misjudged and allowed themselves to be situated around
a habitual pub corner table.
After years of cribbing press releases, journalists were no doubt resentful
that a few former colleagues were writing "sour grapes" articles which began
to be borne out as the year ended, and were even semi-legitimised (in their
eyes) by a tv documentary. The Press confusion was evident in the Sunday
Times publishing a weak pastiche of a Workers' City meeting, which merely
demonstrated the perpetrator's ignorance of those he would parody.
Even the Press's snide sniping was forced onto the defensive: "? the high
profile enjoyed by Workers City was more than a matter of influential
friends, it was also a reflection of the way the group gave expression to an
unfocussed sense of unease in a much wider swathe of the city." (Scotland on
Sunday, 23/12/90)
Overall, the Year of Culture was remarkable for the extent to which
opposition almost accidentally formed around a core campaign which probably
expected to be peripheral to the whole affair, and the way in which this
opposition was forced onto the agenda. But the issues were not
straightforward, and their momentum was provided as much by the interplay of
interests within the restructuring bureaucracy.
Alex Richards
Further Reading:
"WORKERS CITY: The real Glasgow Stands Up" (1988) and "The Reckoning: Public
Loss, Private Gain" (1990) both edited by Farquhar McLay (published by
Clydeside Press, 37 High St, Glasgow)
"Glasgow Keelie" newssheet (PO Box 239, Glasgow G3 6RA)
"GLASGOW 1990: The TRUE Story Behind the Hype" by David Kemp (Famedram
Publishers, Gartocharn, Dumbarton)
abelling of st?r<w? A`7e @`Me? ? ?`:?
From Here & Now 11 1991 - No copyright