The Future of Heritage: Concept, Context and Control
Return to Politics and Culture
Delivered to the Re:source Staff Development Day 2001
Date: 08/10/2001
Venue: London, UK
Article
In accord with Hegel, the owl of Minerva does indeed take flight at twilight. Over the past decade, more public, national libraries have been built and inaugurated than in any previous period. ... An obsession with conservation and custodianship is paradoxically instrumental in modernity. ... The realisation of the mortality of all cultures, as Valery put it, laid bare by two World Wars, has generated a deep-lying anxiety. An inventory must be made, remembrance must be documented and warehoused before it is too late (Hegel's twilight). An obscurely felt eschatology and sense of an ending are operative.
But so are futuristic intuitions and technological innovations. An equivalence is posited, often without closer scrutiny, between knowledge and power, between access to information and its social-economic appliance. In their very architecture, the new libraries are like mammoth generators and power stations designed to transform what is taken to be knowledge into intellectual and social yield. This process, this 'fast-breeder reactor', develops its own inertial thrust. ... It is these collaborative contradictions between the archival and the forward-bound, between museum and laboratory, which endow the leviathan libraries recently inaugurated or in progress with their uncertainties of purpose and planning. These vacillations seem to render these ziggurats of marble, brick and glass strangely off-balance, even transient, like titanic toys destined to be broken. For it is obvious that the Mitterand, the British Library, the addenda to the Library of Congress are obsolete even as they are opened. The dilemma is that of the format and future of the book.
In their design, these libraries articulate a logic of unavoidable uncertainty and indeterminacy. They are centaurs, part shrine, part futurama. Their treasures out of the past are, literally, enshrined in hushed, dimly lit sanctuaries of safety glass and precious woods. They are hardly meant to be touched, let alone consulted ... Lazarus is patron saint of library stacks." -
Grammars of Creation, George Steiner, Faber & Faber 2001 pp.241-3.
1. Introduction: From Homer to Auschewitz, from Sunrise to Sunset
Thinking of Steiner's quote it seems to me that there are four major factors which we need to consider in order to understand the way that our culture is changing. They are:
- Nationalism
- Classicism
- Biology
- Belief.
As Albanians court economic disaster for the sake of a spurious nationalism in the mountains of Macedonia, as Robert Mugabe wrecks the Zimbabwean economy for the sake of racial and political purity, as the people of Ulster go to the negotiating brink over the symbolic minutiae of governance, I think of a man from Tarsus, a tent maker by trade, appealing over the heads of an immediate jurisdiction to the Roman court: "Civis Romanus sum", said St. Paul. Our history may be one of oppression and exploitation from feudalism to the factory floor but most Europeans and peoples further afield rarely entangled justice and nationalism until the end of the Napoleonic Wars; people simply did not think they would do better under dictators of their own ethnicity and, indeed, recent scholarship shows that the slaves of North America were divided in their allegiance during the American War of Independence. This is one, clear, sharp fact of our existence. Some of us may be Euro-Federalists but we are having to 'sink' or pool the sovereignty we thought advisable to maintain after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. We are nationalists in a way that Foreign Secretary John Milton would never have recognised as he wrote his letters in Latin, on behalf of Protector Cromwell, to the courts of Europe.
Later, Milton would write many of his greatest works in Latin; and it is Milton who is, in many ways, at the core of our discourse today, particularly in respect of classicism, a word I use here very broadly to describe the unfolding of culture from Homer to the beginning of the First World War. Up until his generation it was possible for the educated man in Europe to have read, by the age of 30, every book that mattered. Some great commentaries on classical works might have eluded him but he could trust himself from Homer to Galileo. A century later novels were still being written in Latin but by then the move to the vernacular in Western Europe was unstoppable, even giants such as Newton and Spinoza favoured Latin. It was in the age of Milton that the Royal Society was founded by visionaries such as Wilkin, the true father of hypertext and precursor of Leibniz, John Evelyn and Christopher Wren. This was the last generation of genuine polymaths; the Encyclopaedists of the 18th Century in France were the first to play catch-up ball in the field of archiving. We have all been behind ever since. Behind with the quantity, behind with the translations, behind with the grasp of concepts. It is significant that it was not until Vico's La Scienza Nuova (1725, 1730, 1744) that our culture recognised that words and concepts changed their meaning through time. I think of him every time I go to the opera and fret with the synopsis. Until the era of Beaumarchais and Metastasio the plots were all taken from the ancient world; the peoples of Europe knew more about the Trojan War than the 30 Years War of 1618-48. If we follow the progression of Homer's Iliad, it was initially a written product of an aural culture, generated from a small and still unstable society. It gained monumental status by the time of Alexander the Great; it was transmuted by Virgil for the Aeneid where it took on a decidedly Roman view both of war and the Greeks whose story it told. Dante's Divina Comedia provides a Christian re-framing of Virgil and Milton re-frames Dante in a post Reformation mould. As the speed of cultural production, economic growth and political change all accelerated, re-framing became more difficult; there were new plots, new perspectives; the classical learning of our private schools was a rearguard action. Now most people with university degrees even find Robert Graves Greek Myths difficult to understand. I wonder whether they find Poussin's pictures any easier or whether they can grasp anything but the surface impression from a Rameau opera. I am, remember, being quite deliberately and specifically elitist here, confining my question to those with a university degree. If the vast bulk of our society can gain nothing from the sum total of our intellectual heritage before, say, 1800, what does that indicate about archiving and 'translation'? I will return to this question at the end of this presentation.
The third factor, biology, has two immensely complex pieces to it, the nature of parentage and the commodification of children on the one hand and the influence of mind altering drugs on the other. It is impossible to map the first in any clear way but important to note that it will at the very least make 'classical' works more difficult to grasp. As for drugs, we know from an endless stream of commentators - Zola and Dickens spring immediately to mind - that drugs are not a new problem but what is new is their ubiquity amongst people between the ages of 15 and 25, a time when we cannot seriously contemplate ignoring them and their intellectual development. But, as I said, both these areas would require major presentations on their own simply to describe our very shallow understanding of their implications.
A fourth (I use the word literally) misconception concerns the core of the Hebraic-Christian tradition. A Summer never goes by without hearing the comment "The sun shines on the righteous" to which I always have to add: "and the unrighteous alike", an addition which turns around the modern understanding by precisely 180 degrees; the whole point is that it does not shine down merely on the righteous. This is a trivial example to be sure. At a much deeper level the explicit religiosity of Donne or the indirect religiosity of Shakespeare are bound to puzzle many modern readers. This is not simply a matter of belief for its own sake. The late Professor Plumb often remarked that the greatest single factor in 18th Century British politics was the high probability of sudden death. It is impossible to untangle the symbiosis, selfish or virtuous, between religious belief and the fear of death; it is impossible to characterise the exact idea of the love of God as an insurance policy against Hell. In addition, our notion of clericalism and theology has been deeply affected by 18th Century lassitude, the careful observation of Jane Austen, the sarcasms of Charles Dickens and the now apparently ridiculous resistance of Bishop Wilberforce to Darwinian science, remembering, of course, that Darwin was a revolutionary geologist long before he turned seriously to the Origin of Species; it was the discovery of sea shell deposits half way up the Andes, not the tortoises of the Galapagos, that did for Bishop Usher’s calculations of the date of the creation described in the Book of Genesis. Even in this instance, the Christian perspective of Darwin has largely been lost in the Dawkins hi-jack.
Finally, in this exposition I should refer again, if only briefly, to the opening quotation which has many general observations of importance but, excepting Lazarus only specifies one individual, namely G.W.F. Hegel. As Christianity broke down as an intellectually as well as psychologically organising force in our culture it gave way to the endless equivocation of the judicious scholar. What had seemed necessary if complex in Aquinas became to appear gratuitous in Diderot. The Enlightenment had started out as liberating but it drowned in its own footnotes. Hegel, and after him Marx, in parallel with the outrageous claims of post Herder romanticism, preached a new religion of progress. Somewhere, in the trenches of the Somme or in the death camps of Eastern Europe, Nazi and Stalinist, we lost any sense of forward momentum. If post modernism is anything it is circular. Culture, unlike physical matter carries entropy in every signifier.
In a telling image near the opening of his book, Steiner (to whom I acknowledge a huge intellectual debt, not least in respect of this presentation), describes our society as one which has a deep sense of living in the afternoon. If the dawn came with Homer and the noon with Dante, then we are moving towards nightfall, pursued by the knowledge of what we have done to our own kind and our planet. My initial response to this, largely resulting from a deep attachment to Sappho, was that we might be moving towards a cultural silver age lived in moonlight but I now think, on reflection, that the metaphor of permanent night with artificial light is much more fitting. What do I think this age will look like?
I think that our culture will have three major characteristics; it will be:
- Irrational and volatile
- Eclectic
- Collaborative.
What I want to do is to match these ideas with the concepts in the title of this presentation:
- Concept
- Context
- Control
which produces three ideas; that our culture will:
- Be conceptually volatile and irrational, even in the face of the advance of science
- That it will be eclectic in spite of political nationalism and the apparent inevitability of the hegemony of English
- And that the production of new cultural material will be collaborative in spite of the apparent insatiability of individual fulfilment in our society.
2. The Concept of Culture: Volatility, Irrationality and the Advancement of Science
My favourite anecdote in J. Allen Paulos' wonderfully funny book on Innumeracy is that of the American Congressman who opposed the institution of daylight saving time because it would speed up the bleaching of curtains. The book commences with a discussion of the probabilities of coin tossing and ends with some horrible examples of how policy makers are undone by statistical illiteracy. Of course it is not quite that simple, the statistical problem is compounded by philosophical illiteracy in respect of the problems of disproving a negative. Let me take four recent examples:
- The first is the probability of contracting Creutzfeld/Jacobs' disease from animals infected with BSE and its effect on blood transfusions. The technology of blood transfusion analysis is such that blood supposedly at risk of CJD transmission could be separated from supposedly 'clean blood'. If there is any statistically risk of infection of course it should be avoided but if all the 'clean' blood runs out, it isn't difficult to calculate the relative risks of dying from blood possibly carrying a CJD risk and dying from not having a transfusion at all. Much the same set of circumstances surrounds the analysis of vaccination.
- Secondly, there is the now notorious case of the solicitor in prison for the murder of her two children. Her defence counsel was so statistically illiterate that he could not distinguish the difference between two children of the same parents dying in circumstances of a multitude of environmental variables and dying in an environment with no variables. The Judge was no better, the jury was misled.
- Thirdly, there is the chronic miscalculation of risk to children from strangers versus risk from family and friends.
- There is, finally, the problem of statistical conflation that arises from some of these problems. The best example of this is the United States conflation of BSE/CJD with Foot and Mouth disease such that when the latter broke out all British meat was characterised as bearing the risks of the former.
We now need to add to this the influence in our system of the mass media. I am being rather specific here because the mass media of other countries are far less hysterical than ours. The culture of untrammelled capitalism has totally saturated our information systems, even infecting the BBC. It would, for instance, be inconceivable in this country for the Prime Minister's e-mail address to be public property but that is the case in Finland. Simply as an aside I would call for the re-constitution of the BBC as a public broadcasting body but, to return to our topic, the profit motive in our media and the lobbying tactics of interest groups both lead to the gross manipulation of information. People become hysterical when they are fed bogus statistics about vaccination or the risk from BSE or the prevalence of rapists behind bushes; but because of the volatility of the news Agenda issues burst out and explode, flash into view and disappear. We are being bombarded by masses of unconnected images, bogus statistics and subjective analysis which always adopts the most pessimistic prognosis. Increasingly, too, our news is only interested in what might happen, so we never get to know what did happen today or yesterday.
Ironically, science is no help. A Professor on the radio, bent on inserting all his subordinate clauses while the inevitability of the Weather Forecast cannot be eluded, sounds either shifty or incompetent. The techniques of political interviewing and analysis have spilled over into science. Even with a graduate population in the 20/30 decile running at almost one in three, the peculiarities of specialisation are more tenacious than the generalities of scientific method and the use of logical argument; scientists are no more rational than Druids.
I do not think there is anything that the libraries, museums and archives sector can do about the sham that now passes for public broadcasting but I do think that it should spearhead an initiative for the foundation of a multi-sectoral institute of information integrity so that the public has a much clearer idea of the value of information and its analysis. What, for instance, in a given context, is a fully representational sample, statistical significance and extrapolatability? Of course, such an entity would not confuse the integrity of information with its value and act as a censor in any way. Such an institution should combine the best talents of the library and information sector, academics, market researchers, actuaries, statisticians and, yes, elected politicians. In this last case the political representation should be open and explicit rather than the finagling of former Ministers onto the BBC Board of Governors. There is a place for elected politicians above all other places and that is out in the open.
3. The Context of Culture: Eclecticism and Nationalism
I could quote hundreds of examples from Zadie Smith's White Teeth - a monumental book in the Dickensian tradition - concerning the complexities and ramifications of eclecticism but my favourite is this passage about a gang:
"Raggistanis spoke a strange mix of Jamaican patois, Bengali, Gujarati and English. Their ethos, their manifesto, if it could be called that, was equally a hybrid thing: Allah featured, but more as a collective big brother than a supreme being, a hard-as-fuck geezer who would fight in their corner if necessary; Kung Fu and the works of Bruce Lee were also central to the philosophy; added to this was a smattering of Black Power (as embodied by the album Fear of a Black Planet Public Enemy); but mainly their mission was to put the Invincible back in Indian, the Bad-aaaas back in Bengali, the P-Funk back in Pakistani."
To urge the difficulty of getting under the skin of this passage is not simply to preach a shallow, facile multiculturalism. There is, for a start, the inevitable requirement of translation from the perspective of the actors to that of the spectators. What do I understand by this statement of the motivation behind individual and social action, if not of belief? Our political institutions have tended, admirably in its way, to rely upon tolerance but too often this is the tolerance of indifference, it is the difference between a ceasefire on the one hand and peace on the other. Looked at from the activist perspective, that passage has significant things to say about the precariousness of life in Bangladesh's Jamuna delta, it reverberates with the heritage of Rabindranath Tagore. Jamaican Patois has a history of oppression and aggression, of mutual racial contempt; the shades of Islam from Ibn 'Arabi' to Malcolm X are as impossible to gauge and isolate as those in Christianity from Aquinas to Billy Graham. From the spectator perspective we might then have to introduce between ourselves and the text any combination of racial prejudice, post Colonial guilt and excessive tolerance based on the idea of over-compensation for the above.
Just as relativism is the glibbest excuse for ignorance so ignorance is the easiest route to relativism. To assert that "All religions are the same" is to excuse investigating them but nobody who does could make that assertion.
The agenda that this implies is far away from the traditional, organic model where we try to know who we are by reference to where we came from, even though, like the dispute between the Montagues and Capulets, the aetiology has been lost. What we need is a much more lateral model where we exist in a context which is self-referential but which is Eclectic.
This has immense implications for public culture. The primacy of the root is called into question by the necessity for connectivity, mental and moral as well as physical and digital. There is no doubt that the society we live in will want an archiving, a preserving, a taxonomical function for some time to come but whether this is a legitimate high priority in the financing of public culture is surely in question? Heritage, to recall Steiner's quote at the head of this lecture, is very much a matter of occasional, unlikely, resurrection. Do we really need a Roman coin in every town, a deposit library in every capital city, a national corpus of domestic and stolen cultural artefacts?
My emphatic answer is that we do not. We would do well to concentrate in our public, cultural activities on facilitating better understanding, of being socio-cultural translators. Of bringing the best people we know from every sphere of life, every background, and ensuring they have the best possible conditions in which to synthesise what they know. This imperative has long been recognised by those who regret the bifurcation of the arts and the sciences, exemplified in the Two Cultures of C.P. Snow but, as the Smith passage shows, the need is much greater and much deeper. it is far easier for a mathematician to grasp sonata form or for a musician to grasp Godel's Incompleteness theorem than it is for a Member of the UK Independence Party to recognise that, whatever its validity, they cannot achieve their goal of sending home people from ethnic minorities because they were born here; nor is it easy to explain to many members of ethnic minorities why we feel that their theocratic ambitions run counter to the religious tolerance and secular government we have established over a period of 400 years. These problems call for a quite deliberate effort to put us in each other's shoes long before we can feel safe urging that our chief moral principle should be to "Do as we would be done by". The more intractable a problem the higher the level of abstraction is required to find a mutually satisfactory settlement. The mission of culture is to steadily lead us to ever lower levels of concrete reciprocity and agreement.
Just one final note on this topic which refers to my opening remarks. I have no doubt whatsoever, in spite of what is happening in the Balkans - and even in the Scottish Parliament and Welsh assembly - that cultural and social nationalism are not an option. Local sentiment, as we know from the history of baking and brewing, is a natural response to mass production but it is simply that, sentiment. If there is a choice between the flag and the logo, almost all of us will choose the logo. This is not to say that our personal and collective sentiments will not be strong and enduring but we must be careful to separate these from a stereotypical national paradigm. We must, to give an example, be careful that the history of slavery is represented from the West African, Caribbean and English points of view but that is entirely different from thinking all West Africans and Jamaicans morally virtuous and all Englishmen villains.
To make that statement is naturally to assert the uniqueness of the individual and it is to this subject that I will turn next.
4. The Control of Culture: Individualism, Collaboration and Facilitation.
There are two no stranger bedfellows in our culture than high Romanticism and the Puritan work ethic but they are the two motors of our culture. Our idea of true achievement is Proust in his sound proof apartment devoting his life to A La Recherche de Temps Perdu and not Cecil B. De Mille with his cast of thousands in The Ten Commandments; somehow we think of cinema as a much 'lower art form' than a piece of theatre even if that does involve a Director, a Producer and a cast. If you want to check this initial supposition, remember that for almost 400 years our culture has considered Shakespeare as a writer of literature rather than as a dramatist. Far from the play being the thing, the book was the real thing.
At the same time we have been obsessed with process rather than output. Afraid that the District Commissioner, seven days' horse ride from a peer, might find an unanticipated problem intractable, we have sought to equip him for every eventuality. So the icon of our education system is the examination hall, the certificate for solo achievement. Pocket calculators are the toys of cheats, plagiarism (Logoklopia) is rooted out, copying is severely punished. Which begs the question, what is the network for?
It is possible to trace the technical as well as the psychological plasticisation of cultural production. From the scroll to the printed book and the revised edition, from the quill to the typewriter, the human and financial cost of revision has fallen just as our life expectancy has risen. From Bruckner and Eliot to Rothko and Boulez, revision has changed from being a painful precursor to a final, if provisional conclusion, to being an integral part of the work of art itself. Work in progress is no longer a transitional idea, it is the description of the work of art itself. In a sense which will only become obvious once the publishing industry begins to take more notice of Spielberg than Gutenberg, publishing is both provisional and eternal; it is for now and it is forever. it will continue to be possible to maintain authorial integrity, to allow copies and mutations of files without losing the exact initial production but that will be seen as increasingly sterile and egotistical. We have learned to live with linguistic translation and text enlargement, with sound mixing and volume adjustment, with altered colouration and perspective; these are but precursors to an age of what we might call the culture of infinite addenda, an interaction so dense and intense that it will ultimately change the nature of the initial production itself. We have seen this in our own culture in a slow motion fashion through the reinterpretation of texts and artefacts over time, introducing paradigms unknown to the initial creator as a means of analysis; so there is Marxist literary criticism of books written before he was born, there is Freudian analysis of Euripides, there is a pot Shoah analysis of Wagner and now, with deconstruction and postmodernism, there is a move to separate altogether the artefact from authorial intention. This is a case where the speed and intensity of the reaction to expression will qualitatively alter the transaction. A new idea or work of art will be important as long as it is generating meta-criticism; it will be as powerful in reach as the length of its down-stream impact. Occasionally, as with Mendelssohn's supposed 'rediscovery' of Bach there will be a corpus of cultural baggage which disappears and then re-surfaces but the image is, I think, much more concerned with fabrication, with the endless weaving, of interpolation, of new patterns and colours; where the highest art form was once the internally argumentative sonata I think it will soon be the collective writing of variations on original themes. We will still, of course, require composers of themes but without the consequent composition they will be poor and truncated things.
This, again, calls for a radical change in establishment thinking, this time in the area of education and training. I think the Government knows this in a vague way, it knows that the ICT revolution is important but it does not know why. Until it finds out, the cultural sector will have to fill the breach. The great asset of libraries and museums is that they are quintessentially non-judgmental providers. In the final analysis, though we will all have our individual views, the transaction between the custodian and the recipient does not rely either on the judgment of the recipient or her choice of material. You might want me to read Racine in proper, silent respect but you won't stop me borrowing Dick Francis. I think that this attribute is greatly under-valued both by the cultural sector and consumers but it is this very quality which makes it easier for the library and museum sector more than any other to foster the eclecticism and synthesising I mentioned earlier and to promote the creation of collaborative cultural artefacts. This calls on all of us to turn ourselves from keepers into promoters, from mildly opinionated facilitators into passionate advocates, from, to go back to Steiner for a last time, archivists to laboratory technicians.
As to my metaphor of artificial light, it may soon be matched by an artificial environment; our largest, vainest work of archiving might soon be the biological diversity we once took for granted. It seems to me, without being very clear about the calculation, that 'interference' with natural processes operates geometrically rather than arithmetically; that the more we manipulate to achieve a result, the more we have to manipulate to mitigate unwanted collateral damage.
There will be many arguments both of practicality and principle against what I have said but the greatest of them all will be based on legitimately expressed but publicly unacceptable special pleading. For far too long taxation in general and the use of taxation for cultural production, archiving and display in particular have involved a transfer from the poor to the middle class and from the middle class to the rich. We all pay for libraries, museums, opera and the Arts council but who benefits? It is useless to reply that anybody could if they wanted; this is like the judicial argument that we are all equally free to enter the Ritz Hotel; it is a piece of sophistry. There is a clear case for subsidising the production of excellence but this should not be conflated with the subsidising of access. It is incontrovertible, in spite of huge inflation over the past decade, that the cost of the television programmes watched by the poor is much less than the price of programmes watched by the rich but the licence fee is uniform. Barring variations in income tax, which is only a small proportion of public revenues, that is exactly the position with the financing of our public culture.
And so, finally, in addition to all my other recommendations, I urge us to be more considerate of the needs of all our people; not just those whose temperaments, backgrounds and needs chime with our own. There is a place for the Cambridge University Library, a place for the Bodleian Museum but there must be an equal place for public enlightenment. For that you do not need a dream, you could do worse than start with the reconstructed streets within York's Castle Museum but we need to go further; instead of museums of the past we need laboratories of the present; and, to turn an aphorism on its head, we need to think local, act global.