Conceptualizing Cultural Heritage as a Common

Chapter 3 Conceptualizing Cultural Heritage as a Common Pablo Alonso González Introduction The first image (Fig. 3.1) portrays a man getting rid of the stone covering his recently built brick and concrete house, while the second captures a moment of the construction of a monumental heritagized mansion that is being covered with stone (Fig. 3.2). The pictures come from Val de San Lorenzo, in Maragateria, a region of northwest Spain where I have been carrying out research since 2006. The insights provided here arise in the friction between empirical experiences in the field and theoretical reflection. In Val de San Lorenzo, the heritagization process has little to do with preservation; everything is about constructing and deconstructing. The ongoing process is far from being an exclusively social construction of heritage, but rather a quite material one. Why is this happening? Heritage as a Common Post-Workerist thinkers have set out a novel conceptualization of the commons as the collective potential embodied in social creativity, information, knowledge, and forms of life in the era of cognitive capitalism. The flexible post-industrial economy dissolves the boundaries between leisure and work, production, and consumption (Thrift 2005). While the standard liberal narrative affirms that private property is the locus of freedom and productivity as opposed to the public sphere, Hardt and Negri (2009) argue that today the “common” is the locus of freedom and innovation, whose privatization/regulation curtails the open-ended productivity of social life. P. Alonso González (*) University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK e-mail: Pa332@cam.ac.uk © The Author(s) 2015 P.F. Biehl et al. (eds.), Identity and Heritage, SpringerBriefs in Archaeology, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-09689-6_3 27 28 P. Alonso González Fig. 3.1 A man gets rid of the stones covering his brick and concrete modern house Fig. 3.2 A supermodern house, conceived and constructed with modern ideas and materials and covered with old-looking stones and tiles to become a “heritage object”. It functions as both a real estate investment and a representation of the individualized identities of its owners The “common” can be equated with the concept of the “commons” found in works by other authors. It is defined as a heterogeneous realm of differences that the multitude sets out to “reappropriate” by a claim and seizure of “not only its products but also its means of production, that is, the common as its own self-positing and selfreferential production” (Casarino and Negri 2008:17). 3 Conceptualizing Cultural Heritage as a Common 29 Science, language, art, knowledge, or heritage values grow when they are socialized and diffused. Heritage is part of the common goods, which are not only water or air, but also the entities created through artistic dynamics which escape the logics of production/consumption to which the logic of scarcity does or need not apply (Lessig 1996) The expansion of social productive powers in open social networks creates new common values.1 Contrarily, the production of new goods through the logic of capital entails an intrinsic alienation implying that certain entities can only be “yours or mine.” My conception of heritage commons is a situated one that stands in contrast to imperialist traditions treating heritage as a universal global endeavor. This position is embodied by UNESCO, for instance in its condemnation of the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in Afghanistan, whose “acts of destruction committed against cultural monuments” were considered “as crimes against the common heritage of humanity” (Manhart 2001:388). This universalist understanding of the common implies a Western rationality or point-zero perspective (Castro-Gómez 2003), a God-eye view representing itself as being without a point of view. My conceptualization of heritage as a common must be enriched through the juxtaposition of two different ontological senses of it, or different “modes of existence” of heritage. Keeping these two modalities together and connecting them with the concepts of community and identity generates a friction that opens up new potential paths for research. Heritage entities should be considered common in a twofold way. Their first mode of existence comprises their given status in actual states of affairs. They do not have the property (essence) of being heritage or inherently valuable, but rather the capacity to become so. This first mode of existence of heritage is better framed through phenomenological accounts highlighting the radical embodiment of the individual in the community. This “being-in-common” emphasizes the preexistence of community and its identity before our coming into being. Here, community is not a “something”—an essence—but rather “something that happens to us” (Nancy 1991:2). In turn, identity is conceived as a consequence of modern processes of subjectivization and individuation, a long-term distillation process. This is the realm of the given, in which being is lived in-common and consequently shared and relational. Here we find the “common givens”—traditions, the past, material objects or buildings, co-created by unspecified subjectivities during time, and which can be subject to heritagization processes. The second mode of existence comprises the heritage commons as productive forces. The productivist ontology of Deleuze assumed by Hardt and Negri emphasizes the ongoing processes of construction/deconstruction of the common, necessary to sustain or shatter communities. Here, community must be seen as a terrain of struggle where certain forces tend towards disciplining, segmenting, and positioning the community in the market, while alternative forces push towards a 1 In Gabriel Tarde’s sense, values are co-constituted in complex assemblages of culture-economy: they cannot be restricted to cultural or aesthetic judgments or economic phenomena. 30 P. Alonso González governing through community and the reappropriation of collective values from below (Barchiesi 2003:3–4; Rose 1999). What matters here is how the heritage givens are put to work through novel assemblages of value creation. These are paralleled by discourses of identification which reframe modern given identities, fuelled by the agency of self-aware groups able to generate self-representations (Massey and Rose 2003). The modern identity of a village can then be reified as an entity consisting in an abstract identity to which some heritage elements are attached. Identity becomes then a representation that can be marketed and connected to flows of tourism and investment. Which heritage processes foster and which prevent the creation of the common? What appropriations of the common heritage values of communities reinforce or shatter them? Knowledge about heritage processes must get rid of the essentialism that accounts for heritage retroactively without acknowledging the complex process necessary for its formation. We must avoid the “salto mortale” that social constructivism or positivism imply, by positing the knowledgeable subject and the object as the essential terms of the knowledge construction equation. Knowledge cannot be understood as the establishment of a relation between the idea of heritage with the real heritage out there, but “rather as a chain of experiences woven into the tissue of life” (Latour 2007:89). Object and subject are not the “adequate points of departure for any discussion about knowledge acquisition”… but rather “they are generated as a byproduct … of the knowledge making pathways themselves” (Latour 2007:89). The construction of heritage objects is an emergent process involving a relational interplay of knowledge, information, expert regimes, emotions, and institutions. Thus, heritage knowledge is achieved not by linking representations to reality, but through the analysis of the complex chains of experiences leading many different agents to shift “from an uncoordinated to a coordinated movement” (Latour 2007:92) by which heritage is constituted as a social object. In other words, the capacities of some given entities are used by social actors to construct heritage objects relationally, relying on what Gabriel Tarde called the co-operation between brains: heritage cannot exist without high levels of education, tourists who appreciate it, people willing to preserve it for the sake of nationalist or localist passions and believes, and so on (Lazzarato 2002). The value of heritage is sustained by relational networks comprising evaluations without any fundamental essence or basis. Similar to marketing and the service economy, what matters for the construction of heritage is not the object in itself, but the affective and social environment where it can make sense and become valuable. Also, it is fundamental to understand who profits and captures this value in the form of immaterial rents (Vercellone 2008). Whether the “becoming valuable of heritage” is used for the expansion of the common or not is beyond the realm of epistemology and must be related to politics: is the common being captured or put to work for the common good? 3 Conceptualizing Cultural Heritage as a Common 31 On Bricks and Stones Most people have been devoted to textile work since medieval times in Val de San Lorenzo, a small village of 700 inhabitants in northwestern Spain. The slow and late industrialization progress freed many hands from work and led many to emigrate to South America and the Caribbean between 1870 and 1950. These emigrants influenced the different paths towards modernization in the village. Two clear tendencies emerged. A group influenced by the liberal ideas coming from the emigrants in Cuba followed an individualist path towards modernization. They strove to create private textile companies with salaried labor comprising all productive processes. A more numerous second group assumed the socialist ideas arriving from Buenos Aires. They established a communal textile company called “Communal” that continued with traditional forms of production based on commonality and the familial unit of production. This communitarian ethos was reflected in the homogeneity of the village, by the use of similar architectural elements and local materials such as stone and straw (Fig. 3.3), and an overall lack of individualization of houses. During the burst of the Spanish economy between 1960 and 1980 the “liberal entrepreneurs” made great profits and started to build huge brick and concrete houses conforming to the patterns of modernity (Fig. 3.4). Thus, architecture was used as a marker of symbolic power, which disrupted the aesthetic homogeneity of the village. Although communal producers could overcome the shock of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship, their profits were not enough to afford building with bricks and concrete. As stone had become a symbol of poverty and backwardness, they covered their façades with limestone. After 1980, industrial profits decayed and companies started to close gradually. In an attempt to reinvigorate the economy of the village, liberal entrepreneurs and the city council implemented a plan of Fig. 3.3 An abandoned vernacular house made of stone, wood, and straw, inhabited until the 1980s 32 P. Alonso González Fig. 3.4 A modern house characteristic of the industrialization process of the 1970s and 1980s heritagization that would facilitate the transition towards a service-based economy. In sum, the city council set up urban laws favoring the use of stone and old-looking tiles while punishing the use of concrete, bricks, and plastic in façades and roofs. In turn, the old Communal factory, closed during the 1990s, became a textile museum in 2006. The heritagization of the building set the standard for future restorations and urban interventions (Fig. 3.5). The process involved the city council, the future curator of the museum, and the architect in charge. They got rid of the “ugly materials” such as plastic or metal, and the concrete covering the stone façade, while brick walls were covered with limestone. Moreover, they decided that a certain kind of blue was the “traditional color” of the region and painted the building accordingly. Rather than historic preservation, this was a process of historic reinvention. The story told in the museum is one of technical progress and modernization, where the existence of a common productive system is disregarded, along with the role of emigrants, women, or workers in the process. Fundamentally, the museum guarantees the immaterial value of the brand “Val de San Lorenzo” in luxury textile objects and reinforces the identity of the village as a touristic destination. The strategy followed to generate symbolic capital is thus halfway between the patent and the copyright. In turn, liberal entrepreneurs reinvested their resources in hotels and restaurants, restoring old houses and building new monumental buildings from scratch, both for themselves and for sale. Those who had so readily embraced modernity and its materiality now move to a supermodern phase (Augé 2008), in which brand new 3 Conceptualizing Cultural Heritage as a Common 33 Fig. 3.5 The aspect of La Comunal as a factory with fiber cement roof and concrete in sight (above) and as a heritagized entity made of artisan tiles and painted with “traditional” colors. Now, stones are on sight while concrete has been covered (below) brick houses are covered with old-looking stones and tiles, allowing architects to freely experiment with vernacular building traditions. Instead, the changes in the houses of ex-communal producers reflect their will to acquire the formerly inaccessible materials such as concrete, bricks or corrugated iron roofs. Paradoxically, they cannot afford to build with stone now, although urban laws encourage it. Both realities clash with the will of entrepreneurs and the local council to preserve the formal homogeneity and urban harmony of the village—which had been disrupted by them before—for touristic aims. Clearly, the old common, the given heritage of the village—vernacular buildings, material culture, pasts, traditions, artisanship, features traditionally considered to be “monuments”, archeological sites, and landscapes—has been put to work for the valorization processes implemented by local entrepreneurs. They have shifted from a productive industrial paradigm to a model based on the capture of the rents generated by the common values of the village through tourism and service-based economies. At the symbolic level, the museum and urban policies endeavor to establish a new ideal of community that recreates a harmonic past that never existed. This strategy is aimed at creating a touristic destination, an identity, and a brand distinguishing the village from other places. However, this situation entails a twofold oppression. At the level of identity politics, it excludes from participation, silences the voices, and does not represent the 34 P. Alonso González identities of most people in the community. At the level of ontological politics (sensu Mol 1999), it does not acknowledge the common sources that provide the value captured by local entrepreneurs. If the communal factory had been metaphorically appropriated and its existence discursively silenced, the common values of the village are materially captured by a few people while the village rapidly decays, economically and demographically. This entails a disaffection of the population with their textile past and traditions, a split between subjects and objects. In addition, it leads to the gradual destruction of the common values of the village— for instance, by people not caring about its aesthetics, preserving textile objects and traditions, or even purposefully acting against the heritagization process, as the man getting rid of stones to leave to ugly bricks in sight shows in the first figure. During the period of industrialization, communal production emerged as a response to the liberal and individualist producers in the village. Could we similarly devise models of reappropriation of the common to oppose its privatization in the postindustrial period? Conclusion The construction of heritage as a social object is a complex process involving many objects and subjects. It is not out there, waiting to be discovered, nor in here, in the mind of the researcher. Rather, heritage is an emergent assemblage that implies novel distributions of the material and the discursive. Architects and curators bring in their knowledge practices, handworkers, and construction entrepreneurs, their know-how and techniques, politicians pursue their networks and influence, and tourists are, or are not, attracted by the heritage elements. All those, among many others, participate in the construction of the relational chain of experiences, meaning, and value that enables the construction of heritage entities. The fundamental alienation and inequality entailed by the appropriation of common values through heritage constructions calls for a politically involved approach to heritage studies. Granting ontological status to these common values in our critical accounts and working with communities to help them in acknowledging the existence of these values would be a first step. Leaving aside issues of authenticity, we should focus on the connection between people in communities and the things— the given heritages—they value most, and how the heritagization process might disrupt or reinforce these associations. We should overcome outwardly critical accounts of these processes to start devising potential responses to processes of capture of the contemporary commons beyond the simple reaffirmation or recognition of identities. Ultimately, what communities and people need is to harness and strengthen their common creativity and potential, and have an equal share of it. There are a series of ongoing experimentations in forms of reappropriating heritage common values. These include cultural parks or heritage areas with strong public management schemes and democratic decision making like the Val di Cornia in Italy, semipublic institutions of heritage production such as the Oficina del 3 Conceptualizing Cultural Heritage as a Common 35 Historiador in Havana, Cuba, or communal experiences of ecotourism (Alonso González 2013; Stronza 2009). Although addressing these modes of reappropriation goes beyond the scope of this paper, it constitutes a fruitful research strand needs to be further explored. References Alonso González, P. (2013). Cultural parks and national heritage areas: Assembling cultural heritage, development and spatial planning. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Augé, M. (2008). Non-places. London: Verso. Barchiesi, F. (2003). Communities between commons and commodities: Subjectivity and needs in the definition of new social movements. The Commoner, 6, 1–6. Casarino, C., & Negri, A. (2008). 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