Building a Small Cinema: Modernity and the Neoliberal City

By Anthony Killick.

“…to imagine and to create new modes of modernity, in which man will not exist for the sake of development, but development for the sake of man.” (Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air)

“The absolute opposite of the corporate multiplex experience.” (Guardian report on Liverpool Small Cinema, March 2015)

In February/March 2015 a group of volunteers undertook the construction of a cinema space on the ground floor of a former magistrates court in Liverpool’s city centre. Inspired by the independent kinos of Berlin, the “Small Cinema” project had already converted a number of disused spaces around the country, including a former working mens club in the Moston area of Manchester. Although the Liverpool project received some BFI funding, this was allocated more to the impending programming and functioning of the cinema than it was to the building of it. The construction process therefore necessitated the use of voluntary labour, as well as recycled and/or donated materials from a variety of semi-interdependent arts organisations in the city.

In its stated aim of “creating cinemas not supermarkets” the project recognises its position between two forms of modernity. On the one hand it both operates within, and attempts to subvert, the restrictions of the market imposed by a capitalist modernity that thrives on uneven geographical development and the “creative destruction” of urban environments, usually, as we have seen in the north of England in previous decades, in the form of de-industrialisation. On the other hand, in this subversion the project embraces the need to transgress those restrictions, creating spaces that are built and managed in ways that more accurately fit within the paradigm of a collaborative commons than a capitalist marketplace.

I want to examine the Small Cinema project in relation to these two forms of modernity, primarily with reference to David Harvey’s (2014) explanation of how capitalist modernity functions across regions, before looking at Habermas’ (1987) theory of an avant-garde modernity oriented towards countering colonisation of the lifeworld through an abject process of renewal via exploration into uncharted territory. This latter form, although seemingly abstract, is frequently implemented within the multifarious vacant and derelict cracks of the neoliberal city. Analysing the Small Cinema project yields useful information on how two forms of modernity sit alongside each other in ways that are at once conducive and conflictual, perhaps providing some ground for the demarcation of the ambivalent processes and relations that facilitate city development. Rifkin’s (2014) theory, for example, of an emerging sharing economy that will seriously undermine the economic dominance of capital over the coming decades sheds light on the significance of these relations, pointing, as it does, towards newly emerging forms of commons within both online and physical space. In this context we witness the importance of alternative modes of cinema management and film exhibition in relation to broader cultural practices within the city, fostering, in this case, a nascent filmic commons in an increasingly privatised urban environment where the corporate multiplex reigns. Projects such as this also have an important function for residents and communities looking to re-assert themselves as a creative, artistic public in an age of austerity. As Habermas notes:

“Many different occasions for discontent and protest arise wherever a one-sided form of modernisation, guided by criteria of economic and administrative rationality, invades domains of life which are centered on the task of cultural transmission, social integration, socialisation and education, domains oriented towards quite different criteria, namely towards those of communicative rationality.” (Habermas 1996: 44)

Liverpool: Emerging Modernities

The regeneration of Liverpool has been carried out under a process of capitalist modernity that engenders unequal geographical development. Within the context of this historical project, contemporary regeneration goes part in parcel with the de-industrialisation that took place through the 1970s and 80s, both arising from capitals need to frequently move from one region of the world to another in order to maintain and reproduce itself. In brief, a process of cumulative causation, whereby regions with conditions favourable to capital attract investment, also ensures capitals flight from the area when local costs rise, ironically enough, as a result of the original investment. Such costs can include wage demands from a newly organised labour force, rising taxes, increased tariffs and penalties on pollution, all serving to make the area “uncompetitive.” The consequence is usually outsourcing of production to areas more favourable to capital’s needs. The principle, Harvey explains, is this:

“capital creates a geographical landscape that meets its needs at one point in time, only to have to destroy it at a later point in time to facilitate capital’s further expansion and qualitative transformation. Capital unleashes the powers of ‘creative destruction’ upon the land. Some factions benefit from creativity, while others suffer from destruction. Invariably, this involves a class disparity.” (Harvey 2014: 155)

This cyclical process of construction/destruction allows for the absorption of over-accumulated labour and capital. Production facilities can be moved to regions where the wage rates aren’t so high, or workers have fewer rights, for example, and this allows for the dispensation of some surplus capital while tapping the vast, desperate resource of unemployed labour. Crucially, this has cities competing with each other for influxes of capital investment in order to cauterise the wounds left by capital in the first place.

“Unleashing interurban, interregional and international competition is not only a primary means whereby the new comes to supplant the old, but a context in which the search for the new, billed as the search for competitive advantage, becomes critical to capital’s capacity to reproduce itself.” (Harvey 2014: 161)

The rapid transformation of Liverpool under the banner of “regeneration” has been a longstanding source of concern for many of the city’s inhabitants. Although it was designated European capital of culture in 2008, the subsequent boost to the economy has done little in terms of regenerating areas outside of the city centre, as a recent Guardian report (Harris 2015) shows. In May 2014 the mayor, Joe Anderson, unveiled a £1.5 billion regeneration plan for the Kings Dock and Lime Street area (both at the city centre). Steve Parry, the managing director of Neptune Developments, who have been tasked with the regeneration of Lime Street, stated the projects aims as “tidying up” the area and populating it with “good quality occupants” (Pattinson 2015). Since 2005 transformation of the centre has been carried out under the auspices of the City Centre Business Improvement District, effectively privatising miles of space to the extent that this district has its own “dedicated enforcement officers” patrolling the streets (CCBID 2015). The BID model is based on a supposed “successful city centre management model adopted throughout North America, where businesses have a more direct ‘say’ in how the city centre is managed and promoted” (ibid). Throughout the 1980s, the colonisaton of cultural policy by economic concerns, along with the intermeshing of cultural policy and city building, saw a move away from the social democratic rationale of the 1960s and 70s towards what Warpole (1992) has called a “retail revolution” involving “the appropriation and ownership of town centres by pension funds and insurance companies; creation of closed, private spaces in town centres” and “escalation of town-centre rents, so that only multiples can afford to be there” (Warpole 1992:17). As McGuigan notes, “where once was ‘the state’ now there is ‘the market’ in discussion of cultural policy” (McGuigan 1996: 53).

We can see this as a problem insofar as the urban environment is increasingly structured towards meeting the needs of capital rather than the city’s inhabitants, with added hostility for those who may not be categorised as “good quality occupants.” A particularly brutal feature of this form of capitalist modernity is the appearance of “defensive architecture” designed to make cities impossible dwellings for homeless people.

“From ubiquitous protrusions on window ledges to bus-shelter seats that pivot forward, from water sprinklers and loud muzak to hard tubular rests, from metal park benches with solid dividers to forests of pointed cement bollards under bridges, urban spaces are aggressively rejecting soft, human bodies” (Andreou 2015)

As cities become increasingly hostile, so do their inhabitants. The lived environment plays a significant role in shaping our basic social-moral compass, including ideas around political legitimacy and protest. As neoliberal ethics are etched onto the landscape of the city, so too they become normalised within consciousness, insofar as our environment acts as a template of personality socialisation. As noted, the American model of city building embodied in BID’s forms a significant cornerstone of regeneration strategy in the UK post de-industrialisation. McGuigan points out how this model

“was pioneered by […] Baltimore’s transformation from a blue-collar to a white-collar city with downtown financial institutions, luxury apartments, a plethora of restaurants, hotels and harbor marinas, only a short distance from dilapidated working class housing and industrial districts, a spatial mix which was to be replicated in similar places such as Northern English cities like Liverpool and Manchester.” (McGuigan 1996: 98)

The deeply entrenched wealth disparity represented in the landscape of Baltimore serves to marginalise inhabitants, and, as a worsening constant, is at the very least partly responsible for recent rioting and unrest in the city. Far from registering the potential dangers in following this model of city building, it seems that UK cultural policy is increasingly geared towards following suit.

The Small Cinema: Competing Modernities

The landscape of the supposed postmodern city is reflective of the processes of uneven geographical development required for the reproduction of capital. It is a by-product of a specific form of modernisation that is increasingly de-coupled from the reflexivity required, according to Lefebvre’s (1995) definition of the term, to call it modernity, and guided by the instrumental rationality of steering media such as the market. The neoconservative expression of the “postmodern,” ironically, uses the break between modernisation and modernity, between process and reflection, to amplify the supposed failings of a cultural self-understanding, securing the dominance of these steering media as having subsumed all other possibilities and, indeed, counterpossibilities.

“This neoconservative leave-taking of modernity is directed, then, not to the unchecked dynamism of social modernisation, but to the husk of a cultural self-understanding of modernity that appears to have been overtaken.” (Habermas 1987: 3)

Habermas is more sympathetic to what he calls an anarchist inflected postmodernity, under which there is no de-coupling of reflexivity and modernisation, but in which reason itself has become the subjugating force, which is to say that modernity as a project must be transgressed. “But unlike the neoconservative, the anarchist farewell to modernity is meant for society and culture in the same degree” (Habermas 1987: 4). In short, the neoconservative postmodernity is situated more accurately within a Fukuyaman discourse on the end of history, while the anarchist conception is one of revelation and beginning.

My aim here is not to situate the Small Cinema project within either one of these postmodernities (although its tendency is toward the anarchist conception). In order to begin thinking about the project in terms of a social commons, it is necessary to look, as Habermas does, at the failings of both postmodernist conceptions. In going beyond Hegel’s original concept of modernity they fail to understand the new consciousness of time that emerged around the 1800s, and which designated the “modern age” as beginning around three centuries earlier. Modernity, then, creates its own history and normativity. Our present, our “modern age” is that which has just past. Meanwhile,

“The secular concept of modernity expresses the conviction that the future has already begun: it is the epoch that lives for the future […]. Modernity can and will no longer borrow the criteria by which it takes its orientation from the models supplied by another epoch; it has to create its normativity out of itself.” (Habermas 1987: 5-7, emphasis in the original)

This constitution of self involves a break from antiquity, signaled as much by a continuous fashioning of history through consignment of the now to the just past, as well as by the speed with which this takes place. “A present that understands itself as the horizon of the modern age, as the actuality of the most recent period, has to recapitulate the break brought about with the past as a continuous renewal” (Habermas 1987: 7, emphasis in the original). This frequent reference to and recreation of history overcomes the problem of a modernity grounded in and of itself, which would entail an impossible severing of the past advocated by both the neoconservative and, to a lesser extent, anarchist conceptions of postmodernity. The problem, for Habermas, becomes noticeable primarily in the realm of aesthetic criticism, and the first uses of the term “modern” by the French modernes of the eighteenth century, who sought a break from the ancients, and an assimilation of new scientific ideas of progress and perfection. Against an idea of absolute beauty, they “elaborated the criteria of a relative or time-conditioned beauty, and thus articulated the self-understanding of the French Enlightenment as an epochal new beginning” (Habermas 1987: 8). Henceforth, an “authentic” artwork is that which is both actualised in the contemporary moment and yet evokes a timeless constant. This is to “bring the steady flow of trivialities to a standstill […] and satisfy for a moment the eternal longing for beauty – a moment in which the eternal comes into fleeting contact with the actual” (Habermas 1987: 9). Nevertheless, the eternal beauty can only be given meaning and interpreted through the lens of contemporary fashion. “Without this second element” as Baudelaire notes “the first element would be indigestible, tasteless, unadapted and inappropriate to human nature” (qtd. from Habermas 1987: 9).

Tracing the concept of modernity back to Hegel’s use of the term and taking stock of its historical development, primarily in the realm of aesthetic criticism, gives us a vision of modernity in which the contemporary is shot through with a frivolously recalled, realigned and re-consigned history. It is within this form of modernity, as opposed to some kind of postmodernity, that the Small Cinema Project can be placed. This is not to accredit the project with a lack of historical consciousness, it is to emphasise the time consciousness specific to modernity, in which “authentic” artwork brings the eternal into contact with the contemporary actual. As Habermas notes, it was Benjamin who translated this aesthetic relationship between history and fashion, or mode, into dialectics:

“Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is the tiger’s leap into the past […] the same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution.” (Benjamin qtd. from Habermas 1987: 10)

For Habermas, modernity is rooted in “an aesthetic consciousness that rebels against the norm-giving achievements of tradition” (Habermas 1996: 41) in a bid to construct its own normativity. Alternative forms of spatial and cultural reproduction are a reaction against a stultifying, one-sided form of modernisation that encloses physical and, by proxy, mental space, limiting the horizon of possibilities to that which is conducive with capitals reproductive needs. There is nothing new about this process. The enclosure of space has been enacted since Enlightenment philosophers, particularly Locke, ruminated on the use of land for profit over sustenance. In true anti-modernist style, however, we frequently neglect this history, overlooking one of the most efficient models of governance developed by human civilization, that of the commons. As Rifkin notes:

“The right to be included, to have access to one another, which is the right to participate ‘in common’ is the fundamental property right, while private property, the right to enclose, own and exclude is merely a qualified deviation from the norm – although in modern times the qualification has all but subsumed the norm.” (Rifkin, 2014: 158)

We have seen how a suped up form of enclosure is eradicating public space in the neoliberal city. However, we are, according to Rifkin, in the midst of a paradigm shift from market capitalism to what he calls the collaborative commons, a multitudinal plain in which goods are produced and shared at near zero marginal cost. This revolutionary leap is indeed taking place in Benjamin’s open air of history, presenting, as it does, “the ultimate triumph of capitalism” in so far as the paradigm has advanced enough to allow citizens to produce and share goods at near zero marginal cost, facilitating the market’s “inescapable passage from the world stage” (Rifkin 2014: 9). The technological advancements brought about by market capitalism are leading us to a point where increasingly large numbers of “prosumers” can produce and share goods on a collaborative commons at near zero marginal cost, eliminating the element of competition. Concurrently, social movements against enclosure have been gathering steam, as

“A younger generation of scholars and practitioners has begun to reexamine the commons as a governing model. They sense that its guiding principles, if updated and reworked, might offer a more practical organisational model for a transitioning economy where […] property exchange in markets is becoming less relevant than access to shareable goods and services in networks, and where social capital is becoming more valued than market capital in orchestrating economic life.” (Rifkin, 2014: 156-7)

The collaborative commons can take many forms, including physical spaces within the city that are shared and collectively managed, two principles that are fundamental to the Liverpool Small Cinema project, which was built and is currently being run on a purely voluntary, non-profit basis. Central to its functioning is that members of the public can get involved at various levels, including organising their own events, joining the programming team and helping with the general running of the cinema on any given night. “We want to understand,” as a flyer for the project states “the relationship of cinema to community, to test models of film exhibition and question what a future cinema ecology might be” (SC 2015). Here, the process of enclosure is reversed via principles derived from commons practices that pre-date the Enlightenment. In this way the history of cinema is cast in a new light, recreating “the classic cinematic experience […] exploring what cinema used to be, and what form it might take in the future” (SC 2015). Within the context of a paradigm shift from market capitalism to a collaborative commons, this future oriented space, in which the present is continuously reconstituted via reference to the contemporary age just-past, is an example of the unfinished project of modernity outlined by Habermas. Its tendency toward the anarchist conception of postmodernity, as involving a complete break with society and culture, is tempered by a recollection of cinematic experience, and organisational forms that pre-date and episodically litter the history of that society, namely the commons. The interaction between these two spheres facilitates a renewal of cinemas capacity to foster education, understanding and action.

As cities continue to develop, for the most part, in line with the reproductive needs of capital, we can expect the uneven geographical landscape to deepen, and for the urban environment to continue becoming instrumentalised under the auspices of the “retail revolution” that has been disguised as “regeneration,” especially in the North of England. Meanwhile, through a mixture of necessity and interest, larger numbers of people are seeking ways to transgress stultifying physical and mental boundaries through alternative modes of cultural reproduction. In doing so they enact a modernity that “rebels against the norm-giving achievements of tradition” (Habermas 1996: 41). The shift to a collaborative commons, for example, is beginning to have significant effects on market capitalism, to the extent that, as Rifkin notes, even establishment heads such as the former U.S. secretary to the treasury are beginning, shockingly, to admit that “the competitive paradigm cannot be fully appropriate” to future innovation (Rifkin 2014: 8). As practices of sharing and collective management of space, not to mention goods, become increasingly prevalent, questions begin to arise as to how they may be implemented in cultural policy. How might these models be institutionalised at a societal level in moral and legal systems?

Spaces that are collectively managed and shared with the public are, as we have seen, vital for city inhabitants looking for a semblance of control over the way their lived environment develops, and what kinds of experiences they have access to. This being the case, their facilitation at a policy level should form at least some part of a regeneration strategy that, conversely, has repositioned arts and culture within the growth agenda, a move that, on its own, is insufficient in providing access to cultural resources. What the Small Cinema project, and many others like it, continue to show is that mutual co-operation and solidarity is just as capable as the market in the creation and development of space. This is not new knowledge, but it does need re-imagining within a renewed project of modernity that sees beyond the norms given by a capitalist market. In many instances this is exactly what is taking place.

Anthony Killick is a PhD candidate studying film festivals and politics at Edge Hill University and co-director of the Liverpool Radical Film Festival.

References

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