Monica Sassatelli

EUROPEAN CULTURAL SPACE IN THE EUROPEAN CITIES OF CULTURE

ABSTRACT This article considers the role of European Union (EU) cultural policy within the process of Europeanization. It will trace the development of EU competence on cultural matters in general, and of the flagship programme ‘European City of Culture’ in particular. The latter will be observed both in its overall implementation and in the exceptional edition of 2000, when in order to celebrate the millennium nine cities shared the title, allegedly bringing the European reconfiguration of space into full light. This will show that the minutiae of cultural policy-making are never far removed from far-reaching discourses on European identity. How the gap is overcome, rhetorically and practically, provides the strategic vantage point for analyzing how the creation of a ‘European cultural space’ may be suggesting new ways to think of spatiality in its connection to culture and identity formation.

European Identity between Flows and Places Insights from Emerging European Landscape Policies

This article is a contribution to the debate on European identity. It explores the emerging field of European landscape policies, clustering around the European Landscape Convention (Council of Europe, 2000) as an interpretative key for representations of Europe as cultural ‘unity in diversity’, a formula that embodies the main institutional and public narrative of the identity of Europe. The article presents results from fieldwork research tracing the ELC’s discursive field, and the spaces for interpretation and action that it has opened up for actors within European networks and projects. It shows that whereas the official narrative may be reducible to a simplistic model of nested identities, from local to European, actors who have become familiar with it use their ‘European identity’ in more complex ways, displacing binary cultural and spatial logics — unity vs. diversity, places vs. flows — that still mostly inform theories of identity.

An Interview with Jean Baudrillard Europe, Globalization and the Destiny of Culture

One of the most vivid images of Europe today – Europe as culture and identity, struggling to (re)discover its own culture and identity – is found in America, an essay by Jean Baudrillard (Verso, 1989). Even if this text affirms the difficulty of finding ‘a European spirit and culture, a European dynamism’ (p. 83), the outline of America is traced by a gaze that defines itself, repeatedly, as European. After all, it does not come as a surprise that, amid the contemporary wealth of studies on Europe, the latter is unveiled by a study on its most relevant Other. This is what theories of identity hold: that identity is built on distinction from the Other. Yet here is a reversal: the Other is delineated, whereas the Self, Europe, is left at the margins, just as it is secondary in a process of globalization led by America. Modernity, sometimes defined as the brainchild of Europe, has now moved away, because its ultimate product, globalization, is elsewhere. However, as Baudrillard states in this interview, not even America can claim to be the creator of globalization. Globalization has no single creator and its real locus is, clearly, the world. It is an irresistible process, too often reduced to its economic side, that brings about the erosion of differences. Baudrillard’s analysis is subtle: it is not a matter of the disappearance of differences (or, as he says elsewhere, of the Real), but the erosion of their strength, of their reciprocal incommensurability. This is connected to another distinction often overlooked: the global is not the universal; rather, they are opposed, and because of globalization the universal faces the same destiny of particularities, if not worse. Europe, too, is swept away, as the universal coincides with Europe and with Europe’s predicament, having been embodied in the idea of nation. The themes of Europe and globalization lead Baudrillard to some reflections on the destiny of culture. The double erosion produced by globalization, both of the universal and of particularities – between which Europe does not seem able to find an alternative strategy – has important consequences for culture. Culture becomes a kind of universal language, a common denominator. That is, it becomes something totally different from an anthropological idea of culture. Baudrillard does not hide the violence and conflict implied by the idea of culture as specificity and difference, but he also points to the subtler and devastating violence of its contrary, of hyperculture, of indifference. In this interview, European Journal of Social Theory 5(4): 521–530

An Interview with Alessandro Ferrara: Europe, Authenticity and Unavailable Identities

Alessandro Ferrara, a former student of John Searle and Neil Smelser at Berkeley in the late 1970s, of Jürgen Habermas in Frankfurt subsequently, and now Professor of Political Philosophy in Rome, is one of the best-known Italian social and political theorists, a vital contributor to what has been called the third generation of Critical Theory.1 His intellectual programme entails the elaboration of a post-metaphysical approach able to maintain forms of non-foundationalist universalism beyond the plurality of available interpretive frameworks. That involves retrieving elements of universalism that emerge from what he calls the ‘tradition of authenticity’, a lineage that runs from Rousseau, through to Schiller, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger, constituting a neglected variety of modernity overshadowed by the dominant ‘tradition of autonomy’. Looking for bridges, Ferrara has found some building-blocks in Kant’s reflective judgement and Simmel’s exemplary (rather than generalizing) universalism. There are affinities with recent approaches theorizing varieties of modernities, especially as Ferrara’s work points to the necessity of interrogating modernity’s different variants in terms of their implications and possibilities for the construction of contemporary identities. In this interview, Ferrara responds to questions on European identity, which he finds particularly interesting for his approach precisely because, as he says at the beginning, it is both in fieri and impossible, or better, unavailable: something that is not actually likely to be built (or destroyed for that matter), according to an individual plan, political or otherwise. This is why European identity, like any identity, calls into question authenticity, the ‘autocongruence of a symbolic whole embedded in an individual, a group or an abstract entity’, as Ferrara reminds us in closing the interview. In the middle, the answers open up a ‘hermeneutic reconstruction’ – rather than an impossible definition looking for a European essence – of major aspects of European identity. These are traced in recent developments that have pushed forward the process of European integration, and especially as they are embedded in fundamental texts such as the unratified Constitutional European Journal of Social Theory 11(3): 421–437

‘Europe in your Pocket’: narratives of identity in euro iconography

Abstract European institutions have long been concerned with how citizens perceive them and how this is connected to shifting notions of Europe and collective identities. This article contributes to the analysis of EU narratives as revealed by the design of the euro banknotes, their intended institutional meaning and the debate they raised. The seven denominations’ main images are bridges and doors, inspired by European architectural styles, but representing abstract symbols and not actual landmarks. In the public debate, this has attracted more criticism than praise; scholars, too, have generally been dismissive. In this article, I aim to provide an interpretation of how currency iconography becomes the medium of both accepted and occasionally contested narratives of identity. First I consider how the euro was designed and officially promoted; then I advance a critique of the main interpretations, as an indicator of accepted (or unacceptable) representations of Europe. Available narratives will finally be rethought through an analysis of the significance of the bridge and the door as cultural symbols, following Georg Simmel’s essay on the subject. The significance of this will emerge in relation to the wider relevance of architectural metaphors of Europe as tropes in narratives of European identity.

Narratives of European Identity

The Euro-crisis that began in 2010 has shown that, ultimately, legitimation for European integration is sought in a ‘common identity’ and consequent solidarity: in public discourse, bailouts and confidence-boosting packages are presented as possible, sufficient or justifiable in as much as they are intended to benefit the common good of the EU as a whole, and therefore assume a common identity, that could then be organized and represented in ways comparable to the national one. To critics, the on-going crisis is final proof that such an identity is lacking. So, precisely now that the public debate is full of economic and political analysis and ‘hard’ data and arguments, the relevance of soft, cultural aspects of ‘being European’ has never been more crucial. Understanding identity remains central — in Europe as elsewhere — because no matter how flawed the concept might appear (see Brubaker and Cooper 2000 for an oft-cited critique), it remains a politically diffuse category, as well as a ‘practical’ or ‘lay’ one. Notably it is one that may remain ‘unflagged’ in everyday situations, but is invoked in times of crisis.

Symbolic Production in the Art Biennial: Making Worlds:

Biennials – periodic, independent and international exhibitions surveying trends in visual art – have with startling speed become key nodes in linking production, distribution and consumption of contemporary art. Cultural production and consumption have been typically separated in research, neglecting phenomena, like biennials, sitting in between. Biennials have become, however, key sites of both the production of art’s discourse and where that discourse translates into practices of display and contexts of appreciation. They are, this article argues, key sites of art’s symbolic production. Symbolic production is what makes a work, an artist, or even a genre visible and relevant, providing its sense in a system of classifications and, in an exhibition like a biennial, literally giving it a place in the scene. This article proposes a cultural analysis of biennials, focusing on the Venice Biennale, founded in 1895 and the first of the genre, through which we can trace biennials’ rise and transformations.

European Cultural Policies

In the 1980s, a European myth emerged: Jean Monnet, one of the founding fathers of European integration via the European Economic Community, is reported to have said: ‘If we were to do it all over again, we would start with culture.’ The statement’s mythic nature has been exposed from the beginning by its stark contrast with the actual strategy Monnet pursued (Shore, 2000: 42–4). There is even a claim of direct authorship: Jack Lang, French Minister of Culture in the early 1980s, has declared it is something he said whilst he was trying to organize a meeting of fellow ministers of the other member states. To overcome the opposition he was facing, Lang fell back on the usual trope of invoking the founding fathers, suggesting that if Monnet were to start today, he would start from culture. The hypothetical mode of the sentence was soon forgotten and the myth started to circulate.1 Indeed, informal gatherings of the Ministers of Culture started in 1982. The myth has persisted and is still often reported in the literature, both official, but occasionally also academic. Indeed, it deserves the status of myth precisely in the face of contrary evidence: ‘[w]hether Monnet actually pronounced this phrase is of small importance. Its extraordinary impact shows that there is a high level of identification with it. We should ask ourselves the reasons for this’ (Banus, 2002: 158).