Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...

artificial hells
denotes self- realisation and collective action), for New Labour it effectively
referred to the elimination of disruptive individuals. To be included and
participate in society means to conform to full employment, have a disposable
income, and be self- suffi cient.
Incorporated into New Labour’s cultural policy, the social inclusion
discourse leaned heavily upon a report by François Matarasso proving the
positive impact of social participation in the arts. 13 Matarasso lays out fi fty
benefi ts of socially engaged practice, offering ‘proof’ that it reduces isolation
by helping people to make friends, develops community networks and
sociability, helps offenders and victims address issues of crime, contributes
to people’s employability, encourages people to accept risk positively, and
helps transform the image of public bodies. The last of these, perhaps, is
the most insidious: social participation is viewed positively because it
creates submissive citizens who respect authority and accept the ‘risk’ and
responsibility of looking after themselves in the face of diminished public
services. As the cultural theorist Paola Merli has pointed out, none of these
outcomes will change or even raise consciousness of the structural conditions
of people’s daily existence, it will only help people to accept them. 14
The social inclusion agenda is therefore less about repairing the social
bond than a mission to enable all members of society to be self- administering,
fully functioning consumers who do not rely on the welfare state and who
can cope with a deregulated, privatised world. As such, the neoliberal idea
of community doesn’t seek to build social relations, but rather to erode
them; as the sociologist Ulrich Beck has noted, social problems are experienced
as individual rather than collective, and we feel compelled to seek
‘biographic solutions to systemic contradictions’. 15 In this logic, participation
in society is merely participation in the task of being individually
responsible for what, in the past, was the collective concern of the state.
Since the Conservative- Liberal Democrat coalition came to power in May
2010 this devolution of responsibility has accelerated: David Cameron’s
‘Big Society’, ostensibly a form of people power in which the public can
challenge how services such as libraries, schools, police and transport are
being run, in fact denotes a laissez- faire model of government dressed up as
an appeal to foster ‘a new culture of voluntarism, philanthropy, social
action’. 16 It’s a thinly opportunist mask: asking wageless volunteers to pick
up where the government cuts back, all the while privatising those services
that ensure equality of access to education, welfare and culture.
The UK is not alone in this tendency. Northern Europe has experienced
a transformation of the 1960s discourse of participation, creativity and
community; these terms no longer occupy a subversive, anti- authoritarian
force, but have become a cornerstone of post- industrial economic policy.
From the 1990s to the crash in 2008, ‘creativity’ was one of the major buzz
words in the ‘new economy’ that came to replace heavy industry and
commodity production. In 2005, a policy document Our Creative Capacity
14