jwilzewske: Cultural Ecology: The ‘We’ that We Create

“Why has policy had so much trouble generating a body of knowledge capable of playing a significant role in solving the pressing social and economic problems that confront modern urban-industrial societies? An important part of the answer can be traced to discredited, but still operative, empiricist epistemological assumptions.”
— Frank Fischer

DSM: I very much admire and value non-government organizations (NGOs) like Chamber Music America ( CMA ), chartered to foster and promote greater understanding and public awareness. I belong to CMA not just for the material benefits that CMA offers its members:

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CMT: You’re right. NEA was once upon a time the “glue” that held together the entire infrastructure for public funding of the arts in the U.S. But under conservative congress and administrations it has been drastically reduced and constrained. So nonprofits like CMA—always important—are progressively more and more important these days.

DSM: What’s remarkable is how under-appreciated culture is as a national resource—the accumulated capital of each community's (and each nation's – ) ingenuity and creativity. It’s the store of human achievement and cultural memory as well as a source of future creativity and innovation. Our cultural capital has increasing value in a global, knowledge-based economy, and as a key social source as people around the world seek to conserve their identities (including passing it on to coming generations) and to understand others’ cultures. Arts nonprofit trade groups like CMA strive to foster a national conversation about cultural assets and identity.

CMT: Remarkable. Remarkable and frustrating. Policymaking at the federal level relevant to the arts, humanities, and cultural preservation often has been fragmented and fraught with changing political winds. The lack of stability jeopardizes the goal of cultural conservation.

DSM: Cultural policy in the U.S. remains basically a patchwork of arrangements that involve allocating resources and arbitrating value. As an advocate for artist-centered and diverse cultural practices, I’m worried about these arrangements, especially the politics of it. Whose voices are privileged or marginalized in policy discourse: the artists, the government arts administrator, the presenters, the business partners, the foundation program officer, the academics, or the civic leader? How do policies inscribe all members of society with the power of existing interest groups and elites?

CMT: NGOs like CMA strengthen the cultural sector—they serve as a vital ‘check-and-balance’ on government agencies and business sponsors and make the policy arrangements more equitable and fair.

DSM: Communitarian ethics and discursive ethics and analysis enable innovation, debate, power sharing, agenda setting and policy-making practices that acknowledge our pluralism. That’s part of what’s needed, and it’s part of what organizations like CMA do. Policy Studies is not the answer! Policy Studies is a field that exalts “policy” as an empirical science and presumes that facts can be separated from value. This purely empirical stance is mistaken—its epistemological assumptions are incorrect, to paraphrase Fischer. Also, Policy Studies fails to acknowledge the motives and needs of community-based organizations and constituencies. Yes, Policy Studies can be valuable when performing program evaluations of quantifiable, measurable components. It’s a good tool for ‘administering’ a program. But it’s inadequate when it comes to artists, creativity and capturing how imagination enlivens our ‘social imaginaries’ as Charles Taylor calls them.

CMT: Taylor and other post-empiricists don’t reject the validity and value of empirical measurements where they’re possible to do. They simply offer additional methods of working with subjective experience, with poiesis—‘bringing into being’—that is central to music and the arts and aesthetic experiences.

“I adopt the term imaginary because my focus is on the way ordinary people ‘imagine’ their social surrounding, and this is often not expressed in theoretical terms but is carried in images, stories and legends.”
— Charles Taylor

DSM: So Taylor and Fischer and others avoid privileging the ideal of objectivity. They positively engage with the subjective social meanings and motives framing policy-making and how the ‘social imaginary’ contributes to society. They tackle xenophobia and cultural policy arbitration; the increasing privatization of the non-profit cultural sector; the rise of social networking and its impact on cultural production; the cultural policy narratives of public goods and public interest and how they operate in relation to one another.

jwilzewske

Thursday, December 28, 2006

Cultural Ecology: The ‘We’ that We Create

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