Abstract
Caitlin DeSilvey’s Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving puts forward a provocative approach for rethinking the conservation of cultural heritage. The book draws careful and detailed attention to various sites – like derelict homesteads, endangered harbors, and postindustrial ruins – that, although subject to varying stages of degradation, nevertheless retain cultural meaning. However, against conventional approaches to material culture that would seek to conserve such sites by arresting their decay and disintegration, Curated Decay argues that ‘decay and disintegration can be culturally (as well as ecologically) productive’ (p. 5).
The book coheres around a principle of experimentation. DeSilvey considers the potential for experimental heritage practices that approach objects of concern ‘as temporary arrangements of matter that shuttle between durability and vulnerability in response to social and physical forces often outside our control’ (p. 8). An experimental ethic also drives the methodological aspects of the research, through which DeSilvey draws close attention to other-than-human inhabitants and agents often relegated to the margins of culture. As Curated Decay demonstrates, tending to the margins opens up more porous understandings of culture. Culture is not defined against an environmental backdrop, but is rather intricately entangled with the vast materiality of the world.
Curated Decay is also an experiment in academic storytelling. It exemplifies a rich and textured mode of writing that not only draws its reader in but also conjures memories and invites the reader to reminisce. Such an invitation was on full display in an ‘author-meets-critics’ session at the 2017 AAG Annual Meeting in Boston. Remarkably and without prompt, each participant engaged with DeSilvey’s book via his or her own stories, memories, and insights. As Caitlin notes in this forum, such personal touches are not included in the comments to follow – a product, perhaps, of academic convention. Yet, it is important to note that this invitation to reminisce and reflect is a crucial feature of Curated Decay. It wisely avoids normative declarations of what culture or heritage should mean. Instead, it is a generous book, in that it holds an open space for novel approaches to, and understandings of, the changing material conditions of culture.
In the following forum, four scholars – Emma Waterton, Harlan Morehouse, Richard Schein, and Tim Cresswell – engage with some central themes in Curated Decay, focusing on what is at stake – conceptually, culturally, and politically – in DeSilvey’s research. Concluding the forum, Caitlin DeSilvey offers a generous response, providing clarifications, counter-arguments, and opportunities for further conversation.
* * * Yes, I thought, you can spin stories about how it was and how it will be, but stories won’t cause the swerve that would stop us from caring, stop us from going down to the edge of the sea and hauling up the lost stones, one after another, as large as loaves and as heavy as hope (p.68).
Cailtin DeSilvey’s monograph, Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving, offers an intellectually compelling, highly engaging, and much needed contribution to the ‘heritage debates’ first commenced in the 1980s. 1 Mention of the word ‘heritage’, for many, still conjures a constellation of familiar images: snapshots of meticulously dissected archeological sites, desolate yet romantic industrial landscapes and proudly unfeeling stately homes, set within idyllic garden scenes. The ephemeral currents and social dynamics that such places bring with them are rarely brought into view. Teeming with attention to detail and critical perspective, DeSilvey explores a different kind of sensibility in Curated Decay. Adopting a personal-narrative style that foregrounds the gravitational pull of heritage and its ‘affects’, she has composed a volume that is beautifully written in simple but elegant descriptions, intruding on those original heritage debates with innovative reference to philosophies of non-intervention.
Reading Curated Decay, I was immediately struck by the resonances the volume has with two other monographs I have recently encountered: one written by a scholar who would no doubt locate himself outside the field of heritage studies and the other by a scholar who has lived, breathed, and worked within the heritage industry for most of his life. The first is the extraordinary work of Gastón Gordillo and his 2014 exploration of the significance of rubble and the afterlife of destruction; the other, also published in 2014, is a monograph by Denis Byrne called Counterheritage: Critical Perspectives on Heritage Conservation in Asia. 2 Both volumes – albeit in very different ways – seek to break the spell of heritage. They do so by challenging conventional systems of conservation, particularly their class-based affiliations, and by critiquing the lingering Western sensibilities located within those contemporary practices. In her contribution, DeSilvey joins these attempts to rupture dominant ways of thinking about the past by sketching out a comprehensive account of heritage as a process of decay.
DeSilvey begins her intervention by illustrating the current efforts of the heritage industry to arrest decay by turning sites of heritage into tightly managed and sterile places. Against this set of practices, and using a series of illuminating case studies, she stakes out a fresh understanding of heritage that affords a different kind of affective and emotional register. This is an attempt to develop a sense of the past that is rooted in everyday life: in individual and collective memories of places and events; in objects and places that are embedded, though often unremarked, in everyday materialities and spatial productions; and in objects and places that are not always recognized as heritage because they lack the status as such attributed by professional or expert power. There is one particular case study site that sticks in my mind and which threads its way throughout the book: Orford Ness, off the coast of Suffolk. Through the discussion of two different features in this place (a lighthouse and a former atomic weapons test facility), I caught a glimpse of the way heritage sometimes changes the way a place is felt or understood. While the Orford Ness lighthouse may be considered ‘low-key’, in that it has been afforded a Grade II listing by Historic England (a category granted to over 90% of buildings entered onto the National Heritage List for England (NHLE)), its significance, as Curated Decay underscores, is far-reaching. It exposes the multi-layered dynamics that surround the activities of the lighthouse as heritage, along with the individuals and collectives of various kinds that engage in its doing and being. Central here is the notion of encounter: how does this lighthouse figure in everyday life? How do people interact with it? What do such encounters mean? And can they mean more?
Curated Decay is, thus, a compelling case against current management systems in operation at local, national, and international levels. In some ways, it is also a case against any such system at all. Perhaps, more accurately, it is a case against the existence of hard, abstract, and inflexible rules. But it is also a book that seems to be waiting, quietly, in the margins; so much so that I am left with a lingering concern that it will not enter the field of heritage studies as it should. Given that the last book to have a real impact on the field was published in 2006 (Laurajane Smith’s Uses of Heritage), the field is long-overdue a new breakthrough text, one that interrogates the institutionalized and staged understandings of heritage, as Curated Decay does. 3 But I worry about the book’s somewhat limited engagements with the literature that has developed within heritage studies (and the debates from which that literature has emerged) and the consequences this may have for how it is picked up within that field. But I can understand why the literature that sits within the area of academia we might describe as ‘heritage studies’ has, for the most part, been avoided. There is a good reason for that, not least that dense engagements with hordes of scholarly sources would have interrupted and damaged the narrative flow that DeSilvey has achieved. Perhaps, too, the case studies drawn upon – ‘a Montana homestead . . . a nineteenth century Cornish harbour, a remote Cold War research complex, a postindustrial landscape park, a modernist Scottish seminary, a derelict gunpowder works, an abandoned mining camp and an imperilled lighthouse’ (p.6) – and the ways in which they have been managed lie a little too far outside of the dominant iterations of heritage we so often find within the literature.
The ruined test site structures at Orford Ness provide the clearest example of this, given that the philosophies of non-intervention themselves have recently been challenged, and are at risk of being pushed to the side in favor of active preservation and culminating, as DeSilvey points out, in the potential ‘ruination of the ruin’ (p.93). As she goes on to argue, it would be tempting for many likeminded researchers working in the field to ‘imagine that we may finally be ready to push past this paradox and to allow one place – already well on its way – to go on changing, and learn how to make sense of it in its going’ (p.95). I suspect, however, that the field (and the practices it reflects on) is not there yet. While the narrative detail of Curated Decay is engrossing, I worry that it will not, alone, challenge specialists to move away from some of the cultural sensibilities that moderate our approaches to heritage and the past. Putting that concern to the side, however, it is easy to close by stating that the overall significance of this book is beyond doubt. It is sincere and imaginative and lays the foundations, I hope, for a radical re-examination of the nature of heritage and its conventional systems of management.