Enterprise and Heritage

Crosscurrents of National Culture

John Corner, Sylvia Harvey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134946648
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

The phenomena of `enterprise' and `heritage' might at first thought seem unrelated: this book sets out to show that the two concepts are not only related but deeply interdependent. If `enterprise' can be used to define the official encouragement of the values of the market society, then the growth of the heritage industry can be seen as a manifestation of the entrepreneurial spirit - marketing the past so that it is accessible to the man or woman in the street. Using case studies, commentary and critique, the contributors to this lively volume discuss the importance of `enterprise' and `heritage' in British social and cultural life, with examples drawn from film, television, literature, urban planning, architecture, government advertising, information technology and tourism.

Chapter 1: Tradition and translation: national culture in its global context

Kevin Robins

Where once we could believe in the comforts and continuities of Tradition, today we must face the responsibilities of cultural Translation.

Homi Bhabha

This chapter is about changing geographies—particularly the new forces of globalization that are now shaping our times—and what they mean for the economic and cultural life of contemporary Britain. It is in this global context, I think, that we can begin to understand the emergence, over the last decade or so, of both enterprise and heritage cultures. It is also in this context that the problem of empire, for so long at the heart of British national culture and identity, is now taking on a new significance.

TRADITION AND TRANSLATION

Recent debate on the state of British culture and society has tended to concentrate on the power of Tradition. Accounts of the crisis of British (or English) national traditions and cultures have described the cultural survivalism and mutation that comes in the aftermath of an exploded empire. As Raphael Samuel argues in his account of the pathology of Tradition, the idea of nationality continues to have a powerful, if regressive, afterlife, and ‘the sleeping images which spring to life in times of crisis—the fear, for instance, of being “swamped” by foreign invasion—testify to its continuing force’.¹ It is a concern with the past and future of British Tradition that has been central to Prince Charles’s recent declamations on both enterprise and heritage. A ‘new Renaissance for Britain’ can be built, he suggests, upon a new culture of enterprise; a new business ethos, characterized by responsibility and vision, can rebuild the historical sense of community and once again make Britain a world actor. What is also called for, according to the Prince’s ‘personal vision’, is the revival and re-enchantment of our rich national heritage. As Patrick Wright argues, the Prince of Wales has been sensitive to ‘the deepest disruptions and disappointments in the nation’s post-war experience,’² and his invocation of so-called traditional and spiritual values is again intended to restore the sense of British community and confidence that has collapsed in these modern or maybe postmodern times.

This prevailing concern with the comforts and continuities of historical tradition and identity reflects an insular and narcissistic response to the breakdown of Britain. In a psychoanalytic account of early human development, Barry Richards describes a state of narcissistic omnipotence. It involves

protective illusions which can stand in the place of the overwhelming anxieties to which we would be subject if the full helplessness of our condition were borne in upon us as infants. We can abandon these imperial illusions only to the extent that we can face the world without them, having been convinced that it is a sufficiently benign place for our weakness not to be catastrophic, and having gained some faith in our growing powers of independent functioning.³

Protective illusion, I am going to suggest, has also been central to the obsessive construction of both enterprise and heritage cultures in these post-imperial days. The real challenge that I want to consider is about confronting imperial illusion (in both fantasy and literal senses). It is about recognizing the overwhelming anxieties and catastrophic fears that have been born out of empire and the imperial encounter. If, in psychoanalytic terms, ‘a stable disillusionment’ is only achieved ‘through many bruising encounters with the other-ness of external reality’⁴ then in the broader political and cultural sphere what is called for is our recognition of other worlds, the dis-illusioned acknowledgement of other cultures, other identities and ways of life.

This is what I take Homi Bhabha to mean by the responsibility of cultural Translation. It is about taking seriously ‘the deep, the profoundly perturbed and perturbing question of our relationship to others—other cultures, other states, other histories, other experiences, traditions, peoples, and destinies’.⁵ This responsibility demands that we come to terms with the ‘geographical disposition’ that has been so significant for what Edward Said calls the ‘cultural structures of the West’. ‘We could not have had empire itself,’ he argues, ‘as well as many forms of historiography, anthropology, sociology, and modern legal structures, without important philosophical and imaginative processes at work in the production as well as the acquisition, subordination, and settlement of space.’⁶ Empire has long been at the heart of British culture and imagination, manifesting itself in more or less virulent forms, through insular nationalism and through racist paranoia. The relation of Britain to its ‘Other’ is one profoundly important context in which to consider the emergence of both enterprise and heritage cultures. The question is whether, in these supposedly post-imperial times, it is possible to meet the challenge of Translation; whether it is now possible for Britain to accept the world as a sufficiently benign place for its weakness not to be catastrophic. The challenge is not easy, as the Rushdie affair has made clear, for ‘in the attempt to mediate between different cultures, languages and societies, there is always the threat of mis-translation, confusion and fear’.⁷ There is also, and even more tragically, the danger of a fearful refusal to translate: the threat of a retreat into cultural autism and of a rearguard reinforcement of imperial illusions.

THE MAKING OF GEOGRAPHY

Geography has always mattered. For many, it matters now more than ever. Edward Soja, for example, suggests that we are now seeing the formation of new postmodern geographies, and argues that today ‘it may be space more than time that hides consequences from us, the “making of geography” more than the “making of history” that provides the most revealing tactical and theoretical world’.⁸ I want, in the following sections, to explore the spatial context in which enterprise and heritage cultures have been taking shape.

Geographical reconfigurations are clearly central to contemporary economic and cultural transformation. If, however, there is such a phenomenon as the postmodernization of geography, then what is its organizing principle? How are we to make sense of these complex spatial dynamics? What is needed is an understanding of the competing centrifugal and centripetal forces that characterize the new geographical arena. On this basis we can then begin to explore the implications for cultures and identities. More particularly, we can consider the significance of these developments for the geographical disposition that Edward Said sees as so much at the heart of western dominion. Are they likely to reinforce, to recompose, or perhaps even to deconstruct, the geographical disposition of empire? My central concern is whether the ‘making of geography’ can be about the ‘remaking of geography’.

It is clear that geographical transformations are now being brought about through the international restructuring of capitalist economies. This has been associated with a changing role for the nation state (though in precisely what sense it is being transformed remains to be clarified). At the same time there has been a consolidation of supranational blocs (such as the European Community) and a new salience for sub-national territories (regions and localities). The reorganization of the international economic order has also changed the nature and role of cities, bringing about new and direct confrontations between city administrations and transnational corporations, and stimulating global competition between cities to attract ever more mobile investors. It has created new centres and peripheries, and also new territorial hierarchies. It has produced new relational contexts and configurations. Regions, for example, are now assuming a whole new significance in the context of a ‘Europe of the regions’.⁹ And, beyond this, there is the overarching global context: ‘regional differentiation becomes increasingly organised at the international rather than national level; sub-national regions increasingly give way to regions of the global economy’.¹⁰

This process of international restructuration is bringing change not only to the space economy, but to imaginary spaces as well. As territories are transformed, so too are the spaces of identity.¹¹ National cultures and identities have become more troublesome (though they have a long and potent half-life). For many, European culture has offered a more challenging and cosmopolitan alternative, even if there are real difficulties here, too, in exorcising the legacy of colonialism, and even if recent events in Central and Eastern Europe raise questions about what Europe really means.¹² Local and regional cultures have also come to be revalued (as is apparent in the growth of the heritage industry), and there is now a renewed emphasis on territorial locations as poles of identity, community and continuity.¹³

The organizing principle behind these complex transformations, both economic and cultural, as I shall argue in the following sections, is the escalating logic of globalization.¹⁴ More precisely, as I shall then go on to make clear, the so-called postmodernization of geography is about the emergence of a new global-local nexus. Historical capitalism has, of course, always strained to become a world system. The perpetual quest to maximize accumulation has always compelled geographical expansion in search of new markets, raw materials, sources of cheap labour, and so on. The histories of trade and migration, of missionary and military conquest, of imperialism and neo-imperialism, mark the various strategies and stages that have, by the late twentieth century, made capitalism a truly global force. If this process has brought about the organization of production and the control of markets on a world scale, it has also, of course, had profound political and cultural consequences. For all that it has projected itself as transhistorical and transnational, as the transcendent and universalizing force of modernization and modernity, global capitalism has in reality been about westernization—the export of western commodities, values, priorities, ways of life.¹⁵ In a process of unequal cultural encounter, ‘foreign’ populations have been compelled to be the subjects and subalterns of western empire, while, no less significantly, the west has come face to face with the ‘alien’ and ‘exotic’ culture of its ‘Other’. Globalization, as it dissolves the barriers of distance, makes the encounter of colonial centre and colonized periphery immediate and intense.

GLOBAL ACCUMULATION

Enterprise and heritage cultures must both be seen in the context of what has become a globally integrated economic system. What is new and distinctive about global accumulation, and what differentiates it from earlier forms of economic internationalization? Globalization is about the organization of production and the exploitation of markets on a world scale. This, of course, has long historical roots. Since at least the time of the East India Company, it has been at the heart of entrepreneurial dreams and aspirations. What we are seeing is no more than the greater realization of long historical trends towards the global concentration of industrial and financial capital. Transnational corporations remain the key shapers and shakers of the international economy, and it is the ever more extensive and intensive integration of their activities that is the primary dynamic of the globalization process: it remains the case, more than ever, that ‘size is power’.¹⁶ What we are seeing is the continuation of a constant striving to overcome national boundaries, to capture and co-ordinate critical inputs, and to achieve world-scale advantages.

But if this process is clearly about the consolidation of corporate command and control, it is none the less the case that, to this end, we are now seeing significant transformations and innovations in corporate strategy and organization. The limitations of nationally centred multinationals are now becoming clear, and the world’s leading-edge companies are seeking to restructure themselves as ‘flexible transnationals’ on the basis of a philosophy and practice of globalization. These companies must now operate and compete in the world arena in terms of quality, efficiency, product variety, and the close understanding of markets. And they must operate in all markets simultaneously, rather than sequentially. Global corporations are increasingly involved in time-based competition: they must shorten the innovation cycle; cut seconds from process time in the factory; accelerate distribution and consumption times. Global competition pushes towards time-space compression. Globalization is also about the emergence of the decentred or polycentric corporation. As business consultant Kenichi Ohmae points out, global operations require a genuine ‘equidistance of perspective’, treating all strategic markets in the same way, with the same attention, as the home market. He sees Honda, operating in Japan, Europe and North America, as a typical case:

Its managers do not think or act as if the company were divided between Japanese and overseas operations. Indeed, the very word ‘overseas’ has no place in Honda’s vocabulary because the corporation sees itself as equidistant from all its key customers.¹⁷

This whole process has been associated with a corporate philosophy centred around the ‘global product’. A universalizing idea of consumer sovereignty suggests that as people gain access to global information, so they develop global needs and demand global commodities, thereby becoming ‘global citizens’. In his influential book, The Marketing Imagination, the pioneer of this approach, Theodore Levitt, forcefully argues that the new reality is all about global markets and world-standard products. This is, of course, no more than a continuation of mass production strategies which always sought economies of scale on the basis of expanding markets. However, whilst the old multinational corporation did this by operating in a number of countries and by adapting its products to different national preferences, today’s global corporation operates ‘as if the entire world (or major regions of it) were a single, largely identical entity; it does and sells the same things in the same single way everywhere’. Transcending vestigial national differences, the global corporation ‘strives to treat the world as fewer standardised markets rather than as many customised markets’.¹⁸

Of course, there is both hype and hyperbole in this.¹⁹ There has been a tendency to overemphasize the standardization of products and the homogenization of tastes. None the less, it would be a mistake to dismiss this globalizing vision as simply another empty fad or fashion of the advertising industry. Levitt’s position is, in fact, more complex and nuanced than is generally understood. What he recognizes is that global corporations do, indeed, acknowledge differentiated markets and customize for specific market segments. The point, however, is that this is combined with the search for opportunities to sell to similar segments throughout the globe. These same insights have been taken up in Saatchi & Saatchi’s strategies for pan-regional and world marketing. Their well-known maxim that there are more social differences between midtown Manhattan and the Bronx than between Manhattan and the 7th Arrondissement of Paris, suggests the increasing importance of targeting consumers on the basis of demography and habits rather than on the basis of geographical proximity; marketing strategies are ‘consumer-driven’ instead of ‘geography-driven’.²⁰ What is at the heart of this economic logic of world brands remains the overriding need to achieve economies of scale, or, more accurately, to achieve both scale and scope economies—that is, to combine volume and variety production—at the global level.

Globalization also demands considerable changes in corporate behaviour; the flexible transnational must compete in ways that are significantly different from the older multinational firm. In a world of permanent and continuous innovation, a world in which costs must be amortized over a much larger market base, a world in which global span must be combined with rapid, even instantaneous, response, the global corporation must be lean and resourceful. In order to ensure its competitive position it must ensure a global presence: it must be ‘everywhere at once’. This is bringing about significant changes in corporate strategy, with a huge burst of activity centred around mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, alliances, inter-firm agreements and collaborative activities of various kinds. The objective is to combine mobility and flexibility with the control and integration of activities on a world scale. The global corporation seeks to position itself within a ‘tight-loose’ network: tight enough to ensure predictability and stability in dealings with external collaborators; loose enough to ensure manoeuvrability and even reversibility, to permit the redirection of activities and the redrawing of organizational boundaries when that becomes necessary.

Truly global operations imply a quantum reduction in time-space distanciation. Global production and marketing depend upon a massively enhanced ‘presence-availability’, and this has been made possible by new computer-communications systems. On the basis of an electronic communications network, the glob...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: Great Britain Limited
• Chapter 1: Tradition and translation: national culture in its global context
• Chapter 2: Mediating tradition and modernity: the heritage/enterprise couplet
• Chapter 3: Where horses shit a hundred sparrows feed: Docklands and East London during the Thatcher years
• Chapter 4: Enterprise and heritage in the dock
• Chapter 5: The old and new worlds of information technology in Britain
• Chapter 6: The age of leisure
• Chapter 7: ‘Up Where You Belong’: Hollywood images of big business in the 1980s
• Chapter 8: Commerce and culture
• Chapter 9: Over our shoulders: nostalgic screen fictions for the 1980s
• Chapter 10: Echoes of empire: towards a politics of representation
• Chapter 11: Re-imagining the city
• Notes