On Value and Necessity: The Green Book and its others

Abstract

This article examines entrenched debates around cultural value in neo-liberal contexts that have predominated over the last three decades; and moves on to examine how proposals for different forms of social and political structure suggest both alternative ecologies of value and a role for performance in designing them.

We establish a broad frame for discussion of questions of value and culture by looking first at the current debate in the UK neo-liberal state, as exemplified by HM Treasury and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and then turn to what Baudrillard has to say about the State, general equivalence and modernity's adversarial union with Death. In traversing that range, we examine discussions of the evaluation of culture from a policy perspective alongside another set of discussions which address forms of resistance to global capitalism through ‘commonalism’ and social production. Finally, we take in both the pragmatics and the theoretical underpinnings of the left alternative scoped by Roberto Unger to see how ‘institutional contexts permanently open to their own revision’ might both support and depend on collaborative creative practices and sustain an alternative ecology of cultural value.

Notes

¹ That first separation brings other self/other discriminations in its wake – between the properly ‘human’ and improper instances of, for instance, race, class, sex, age or sanity.

² Baudrillard here extends Marx's characterization of money as the ‘general equivalent’.

³ While the Arts Council uses peer review to assess against multiple criteria, its funding by central government depends on meeting the over-riding Green Book criterion.

⁴ Laermans observes that, in collaborative dance, value does not reside in the finished work, but in the total process of its realization: ‘[a]esthetic fetishism’ is resisted by the collaborative research and production being made manifest to the audience (Laermans 2012: 97).

⁵ Unger served in the Lula administration 2007–9. All of his publications are available from his website: www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/unger.

⁶ The UK government is presently pressing for research outputs and data to be open access – to stimulate innovation in a neoliberal economy.

⁷ Unger identifies nineteenthand twentieth-century petit-bourgeois radicalism (in Britain, shopkeepers and artisans) as the stilled motor for an alternative line of development, which might be realised out of the present context. What is needed today is ‘a standard of value more reliable than family selfishness’ (Unger 2009: 48). If Paper Birds are a small business, what they accumulate is principally ‘know-how’ (McDonnell 2013); and the metropolis of project-based transient collaborations resembles more a rapid succession of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) than a factory. Arvidsson notes that social production is not new. For example, the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution was driven by a ‘diffuse production of technological know-how’ through libraries and learned societies (Arvidsson 2009: 13).

⁸ Following Deleuze and Guattari: In the braiding together of ‘generic and individualized faculties’ in collaborative dance, ‘genuine singularities or event-like actualizations of the shared generic potentials … simultaneously by-pass and redefine subjectivity’. Participants ‘transform and exceed their subjectivities’ (Laermans 2012: 98–9). Arvidsson meanwhile is sceptical about any ‘overall transformation of consciousness’ so as to annul conflict (Arvidsson 2009: 15). Baudrillard ‘professes broad agreement with the Deleuzian project of unbinding energies from fixed categories and encouraging flows and intensities’ – but warns that they are recuperable to capitalism (Robinson 2012).

⁹ Perspectives from biogenetic structuralism point to the co-evolution of needs and capacities.

¹⁰ Following Hardt and Negri: ‘[T]he multitude does not need new programmes or ideologies: it needs mechanisms that can institutionalise and objectify what today remains individual concerns’ (Arvidsson 2009: 27).

¹¹ Our thanks to Katie Beswick for this reference.