Abstract
The subject of this book is animated by the author’s experience of four significant locations in the United Kingdom’s cultural landscape – The Lowry (Salford), The Deep (Hull), The Sage (Gateshead) and The Public (West Bromwich). The book asks: how do these new cultural spaces mediate urban experience, as ‘a self-conscious attempt to produce a symbolic shift in the urban skyline, and a new identity for faded or forgotten cityscapes’ (p. 2). The book’s precise objectives are not immediately visible by skimming through it – this extended study is heavily invested in a panoply of critical texts, all of which revolve to greater or lesser degrees around post-Marxist theoretical dilemmas and demand some concentrated reading. The book’s purpose, however, is clear and compelling – it aims to generate a multi-dimensional critical insight into how these new cultural spaces (in Benjamin’s terms, the ‘dreamhouses’ of (post-)industrial capitalism) make possible a particular subjective negotiation of the contemporary cityscape.
One of the notable developments in Marxist thought after Lukács’ 1923 History and Class Consciousness was an attentiveness to the shaping of individual experience, forging a philosophically reflexive understanding of how social systems reproduce, and are bound up in, the formation of human subjectivity. 1 This book is less concerned with systems or agency-structure problems than how they are experienced as a cultural phenomenon, but continues this trajectory, particularly attentive to the means by which capital progressively colonises human experience (leisure, culture, community, all of which are absorbed by the new cultural spaces under discussion). Not forgetting Georg Simmel’s pioneering work two decades before Lukács, Thompson’s research has evidently absorbed a century or more of critical literature and, avoiding the economic sociology so prevalent in it, has mapped out what an aesthetic economy of culture might look like.
The usual empirical content of urban studies of the ‘post-industrial’ – urban economy, planning, urban design, urban development – is avoided; the focus here is the function of cultural space in a particular region of urban development, which is interrogated rather than fully investigated, through a protracted and intense textual engagement with a huge range of thinkers, principally Benjamin and Baudrillard. To some, the book’s theoretical reference points will seem slightly anachronistic: does film remain ‘… the model of contemporary cultural consumption’ (p. 114)? Nonetheless, the book demonstrates that its century-long train of critical thinkers still offers a wealth of thought for a contemporary urban critique of aesthetic economy.
Without affectation, the book is unashamedly ‘post-Benjaminian’ in that it amplifies the often ignored phenomenology of culture, particularly as mediated by the practice of writing, where writing itself mediates critical reflection ‘through’ urban experience (several chapters involve the author walking through the spaces in question). While the heavy investment in conceptual analysis tends to dominate the book, it is important to appreciate the author’s ‘literary’ approach to language and her brave attempts to combine personal anecdote and observational interpretation in these ‘effective, emotive and imagined’ environments (p. 26).
The book’s six chapters are distinct in their approach and conceptually distinctive in the questions to which they respond, albeit all tacitly grappling with the political function of these new cultural spaces of experience, vis-à-vis social class and the reproduction of capital. It is possible to become quickly frustrated by the book’s apparent lack of consistency, logic, argumentation and theory-building, until the meaning of the book’s title becomes clear – ‘constellation’ as a dynamic of criticism (at least, in the classic Benjamin-Adorno-era iteration) deliberately evades the internal instrumental rationality of scholarly research and the conventions of ‘truth’ to which it conforms. The book therefore does not throw much light on the political economy of post-Bilbao mega-museums and does not weigh in with a doctrinaire anti-neoliberal position. Rather, as with Benjamin, the register of its inquiry tends to remain on the level of aesthetic critique, where truth, or indeed historical understanding, is not arrived at by the collection of objective facts but by the dialectics of seeing: taking from the past and the present to illuminate the ‘now’ and the ‘then’ and perhaps the ‘yet to be’. (p. 169)
The book articulates its task in terms of locating a critical position on such spaces (their potential for emancipatory, as much as reified, thought) by a continually oscillating series of reflections on key concepts from Benjamin and from Baudrillard, framed by the author’s own experience of these spaces. I use the term ‘framed’ here because while the book is evidently grounded in empirical research, the attempt, by way of context, to create a dialectical dynamic between Benjamin and Baudrillard finds a more productive resolution than does the articulation of the author’s own experience of the ‘spaces’ as cultural organisations.
The four locations (often referred to in terms of ‘buildings’) – The Lowry, The Deep, The Sage and The Public – are all flagship cultural institutions, each epitomising in their own way a period of ‘heroic’ urban policy in the United Kingdom, which ran from Richard (now Lord) Roger’s Urban Task Force and the subsequent Urban White Paper of 2001, to the success of the Liverpool European Capital of Culture in 2008 (albeit continuing in a less ambitious post-financial crisis manner). This huge trend in using culture as a means of socio-economic development, as this study attests, has involved aesthetic strategies of affection, simulacra, symbolic exchange, the uncanny and memory, and so necessitate us understanding how they ‘mediate and construct experience, through their iconography, their inner spaces, and their relationship to the cityscape’ (p. 2). Indeed, the author attends to the quasi-democratic rhetoric of regeneration, revival, prosperity, access and participation, which define the official narratives generated by these cultural spaces, yet the emphasis throughout the book is more on how a critical interaction with the space can illuminate the intellectual conditions of an ‘intervention’ – for the critical thinker herself.
On a first read, the book seems to foreground these four iconic sites as a resolute capitalist ‘will to power’, rather than the compromised products of a public policy trend, whose processes of construction were highly politicised in their own particular locales. Having said that, the sixth chapter, ‘The Public or the Death and Life of Great British Buildings’, does attend to this by way of using a slightly wider range of empirical material, so offering an insight into the discursive production of this space of urban experience (its incorporation of its ‘public’), where cultural regeneration (not a term explained in the book) provided the material conditions for such production. The book’s priority, however, takes the less tangible aesthetic or symbolic economy of capital, and so unlike Jane Jacobs’ famous 1961 book (which the chapter’s title echoes), urban planning and policy is not the means by which we understand the material mutation of the post-industrial world. Rather, ‘By producing analyses which begin from momentary experiences in these iconic cultural projects, my readings interrupt and intervene in the conventional narratives of the buildings as messianic, fragmentary arrests in the wider fabric, as tears, punctures and apertures’ (p. 39).
There is a lot in this book that requires unpacking – but that in large part is its value. It retrieves a lot of once modish terminology by demonstrating its enduring critical fecundity, and in so doing it cuts across the usual disciplinary norms that define urban and cultural studies, cultural sociology and cultural geography. Through an extended exercise in cultural hermeneutics, it maps out something like an aesthetic economy of contemporary culture – not yet fully explained by any thinker. But for me, the book’s conviction in the power of critical writing to generate the conditions of an urban intervention is its most notable feature.