|
October 15, 2010
In the third part of Illusion Only is Sacred : From the Culture Industry to the Aesthetic Economy in Thesis Eleven No 73 2003 David Roberts says If we agree that culturalproduction has become central to the economy and that the twin utopias of modernism – science/technology and art/culture – constitute, as R&D and as the culture industries, the key growth factors of the new economy, we can now update Heidegger’s ‘Age of the World Picture’.
Roberts says that despite all the talk of postmodernity it is necessary to stress basic conti- nuities: the two basic organizing forces of modernity are still capitalist accumulation and the centralization of power through bureaucratic rationaliz- ation. In this perspective the acceleration of globalization reinforces the Heideggerian ‘completion’ of modernity. At the same time the discourse of postmodernism does indicate a widespread sense of cultural change. He adds:
If, according to Heidegger, the essence of science/technology lies in the reduction of nature to a standing reserve, then the essence of the culture industries lies in the reduction of history, that is, the cultural heritage, to a standing reserve – an essence already inherent in the function of the 19th century museums of natural and art history, which combined the enlightenment project of ordering and classification with the romantic project of the gathering together of the relics of the national past and the trophies of imperialism. The conservation, preservation and marketing of cultural heritage sites exemplify the reduction of history to heritage experiences, packaged as tourist destinations. This reduction and reification both effects and expresses the mutation of the historicism of modernism into contemporary thematism, the progressive transformation of the relics of the past into an ever expanding theme park, in which the originals become over time their own replicas.
There can be no heritage without heritage management and a corresponding bureaucratic drive to expand the empire of CHOs (cultural heritage organizations) by expanding the province of culture until it becomes at the limit the duplication of the world (this is the logic of the sociological- anthropological theory of culture and of cultural studies, in which every social practice acquires its own ‘culture’).
Roberts is using the term ‘culturalism’ to cover both the commodification of cultural heritage and the process that has led in the context of media-based globalization to culture becoming the general, decon- textualized sign and repository of value and to history becoming transformed into forms and themes of cultural expression.
Roberts adds:
The age of culturalism is the age of the symbiosis of the museum and tourism, its monuments are the architectural master works of the last half- century: the Guggenheim, the Beaubourg, the Getty, the Bilboa, the Berlin Jewish museums, to name only a few of the mega-icons of cultural tourism, places of pilgrimage no less important to the local economy than the pos- session of particularly prized relics was in the medieval period. And like medieval religious enterprise it announces a new relation between culture and the economy beyond the antagonisms of the ‘culture industry’.
As a new (ideological) paradigm culturalism presents itself as the antithesis to (the utopia/dystopia of) modernism: it sets preservation against innovation, the irreplaceable values of the global natural and cultural heritage against their reduction to standing reserves.
|
