When we consider where this conference is taking place, Friel's dramatic metaphor of linguistic territorial conflict has a certain piquancy - but that is not the point I am trying to make here. I want to think more broadly about problems of language. At one point a character - an Irish character - comments that words are signals, counters, and they are not immortal.

"It can happen" says the speaker, "that a civilization can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of fact."1

"What we need above all, I want to argue, is a new mental model of the relationships that structure the connections between the arts and society as a whole."

What I want to do this afternoon is carry out a linguistic mapping project of my own, one which makes use of Friel's elegant metaphor for my own purposes. I want to argue that, as we approach the millennium, and we look for a new role for culture in times of very evident change, we too may be representatives of a civilization that is imprisoned in a linguistic contour that no longer matches the landscape of fact.

I want to argue that the way we perceive the cultural landscape is conditioned by the language we use to describe it, and that if we are to find a new role for culture, then we should find new ways of describing - and therefore re-imagining - our cultural surroundings. What we need above all, I want to argue, is a new mental model of the relationships that structure the connections between the arts and society as a whole.

As we approach the millennium, I believe that our sense of ourselves, individually, collectively, nationally, is changing. But the powerful, structuring patterns of thought which quietly shape our thinking about cultural policy are not. I have in mind in particular two mental models that exert a profound influence: they are of the concept of culture as a rather impressive structure in the shape of a pyramid, and the notion of cultural identity as the product of the relationship between a strong centre and a disadvantaged, even dissident, periphery.

As an Englishman, I associate the conception of culture in the shape of a pyramid with the 19th century poet and critic Matthew Arnold's classic definition of culture as : "the best which has been thought or said in the world".2 In this model, the arts are arranged in distinct and discrete layers, with the high arts - meaning the arts that once flourished under the patronage of kings and princes - at the top, and the popular arts, meaning the arts of the people, at the bottom. Within this mental model is inscribed the difference between the arts as a professional activity by and for an elite, and the arts as a communal activity, as something by and for people as a whole. The pyramid model of culture is theocratic, aristocratic, bureaucratic, patriarchal and, I suggest, this hierarchy of the arts, from highbrow, to middlebrow to lowbrow, also carries with it assumptions about a hierarchy of privilege and power.

As with all hierarchies, the focus of power is at the top, and decisions flow from the top. Tip the pyramid on its side, and we can see that this mental model is closely related to my other spatial metaphor, that of centre and periphery. The tip of the pyramid is at the centre - where the decisions are made - the sides and base of the pyramid form the outer limits of what is to be defined as culture, and what is not. And just as the towering pyramid of culture conveys an image of hierarchy, privilege and power, as a mental model the image of centre and periphery carries within it assumptions about inclusion and exclusion, about dominance and subordination, about access and denial, - assumptions that are replicated in the institutional structures that follow the pattern of these ruling mental models.

I put it to you that powerful as these mental models are, they are no longer appropriate to the world as we find it - that the linguistic contours they describe are no longer match the landscape of fact. No longer do we feel confident in the immobile, classic ordering of art forms in the traditional pyramidic hierarchy of value, and we are sensitive to the charges of elitism that this provokes. At the same time the image of centre and periphery is dissolving. The centre is disappearing, and the periphery is everywhere. This is not a matter of the centre collapsing and the periphery filling the empty space, it is a process involving the complete reshaping of our cultural perspectives, one which calls for a new kind of cultural map.

The process I am describing has been going on for some time - indeed, with the hindsight of the late 1990s it could be described as the process that has governed the history of the twentieth century. It is a combination of the restructuring brought about by the economic impact of the market, and the related reshaping of communications by new technology. The compression of space and time by ever faster modes of transport and communications means that we are in virtually instant contact with anywhere at any time, so definitions of distance - upon which the structure of centre-and-periphery depends - disappear. As the participation in this conference shows, this process of globalization has helped to redraw the political as well as the cultural map, so that the faultline between East and West - which in effect divided the world into two competing, hierarchically organised blocks (or as I would have it, pyramids) - is rapidly fading away. Capital itself has spilled out of its former competing nationalist cores and now circles the world in scouring laval flows.

In the developed world at least, mass audiences and mass communications mean that the principles of scarcity and exclusion from which the pyramid derived much of its solidity and cohesion no longer apply. The pyramid is literally crumbling in the face of the levelling onslaught of market forces. And indeed it is now more accurate to think of the arts in terms of a market place, where individual art forms set out their stalls and the audience fills their cultural wire baskets according to their individual taste - a bit of Beethoven here, a bit of Britpop there. Unlike the daunting slopes of the cultural pyramid, the market-place is horizontal, with many entrances, so that superficially, there appears to be a greater democracy in this market model. What we have constantly to remind ourselves, however, is that neither the individual stall holders, nor their potential clients, have equal access to the market.

It is the arrival of the market as a cultural model that has made us talk about the arts as "product", and the great danger of this model is that it reduces the audience from active participants to passive consumers, aimlessly pushing their trolleys down the aisles of a supermarket of styles. At one level globalization has produced a superficial homogeneous culture of blue-jeans, coca-cola, Adidas, Nike and MTV. But the collapse of hierarchy and classification in the arts has also been taken advantage of by the stall holders, who have been very busy trading between themselves. The emergence of the so-called "cross-over culture" has been one of the most interesting and fruitful developments of recent years, where apparent marginality has become a productive space.

Without wishing to offend any of the many distinguished organisations represented in this room, too often do we see institutions of national significance struggling to preserve a conservative notion of official culture, while it is the people from the periphery, and often from the bottom of the pyramid, who in music, dance, the visual arts, film making, theatre and fiction have been the most active, creative and responsive to new conditions.

There are clearly benefits as well as dis-benefits from the collapse of the pyramid model of culture, but I think that we have to acknowledge that it is a fact. One of the major dis-benefits is that the pyramid model has tended to lend support to public patronage of the arts. The motives for doing so have not necessarily been as high as the arts they have supported, be they Napoleonic ideas of la gloire and national prestige, the needs of state propaganda, inter-city rivalries, even the competition for market share between capitalist corporations, but they have ensured the survival of certain art forms and the training and employment of artists that practice them.

But increasingly governments are questioning the cost/benefit of funding the arts. You could say that they are looking for value for money: we are looking for money for values. And the market is gaining ground. In the new global order the high arts are becoming simply a form of specialist niche-marketing. Yet the market - never perfect at the best of times - is notorious for what the economists call "market-failure" when it comes to meeting cultural demand. The market is not efficient when it is called upon to produce certain goods - such as performances of Mahler symphonies or grand opera - which are not susceptible to economies of scale. A further difficulty caused by the impact of the market on the traditional concept of culture is that artists, being creative people have - as I have tried suggest - adapted to the new conditions, whereas on the whole the cultural bureaucracies that administer public patronage of the arts have not. In terms of cultural institutions, the pyramid model, like the model of centre and periphery, still very much applies.

But while I hope that the picture of the new global cultural order (or disorder) that I have been describing is not entirely unrecognisable to you, it is plainly not enough simply to describe this landscape and leave it at that. I think that we can do more - and indeed this conference has been trying to do more - than simply tick off the strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the global marketplace. We must not merely describe this landscape - we must also seek to transform it. Could it not be that, as a first step towards re-imagining the cultural landscape, we attempt to define some new linguistic contours? In other words, should we not try to picture some new mental model for the relationships which we are trying to describe and address?

The new model/metaphor that I would like to propose is neither the monolithic immobility of the Ptolomeic pyramid, nor the hopeless fragmentation and contextuality of Rupert Murdoch's media market-place: it is that of the web. The web suggests multiple chains of communication, with no centre of power. More accurately: in the web there are many centres, many arms, and a plurality of links between them. Power is everywhere - and nowhere. Is it surprising that the potentially most transformative development in culture and communications in this decade has been that of the Internet? The warp and woof of a web usefully suggest both connection and difference - for I take it that one of the constant stimuli to creativity precisely is difference. But we have to be able to conceive of difference without opposition, by accepting the autonomy of local centres of identity. The web I have in mind suggests safety, flexibility not entrapment, and it is institutionally supported at many points. Instead of hierarchy there is equality, instead of domination, communication.

But, you may well ask, what happens to quality? What happens to those high values that the pyramid of patronage used to sustain? As George Steiner once asked: "can there be value without hierarchy?"3 I believe that there can, provided we separate out our cultural values from the patterns of privilege and power which are now a barrier to their communication, and produce a different justification for the arts, one that asserts that access to the arts is a universal human right that civilised nations must sustain. That is one universal value that does not depend on hierarchy, but democracy. At any point across the intersections and reticulations of the web let autonomy and individual difference thrive, let there be local hierarchies of taste, provided that they exist in mutuality, not fundamentalism, and that their values are held within the sustaining web of another universal value, which is the value of pluralism itself.

Now I am acutely conscious that I have been talking entirely in terms of metaphor, and that a language-game can only shadow what is actually going on on the ground. But, as Brian Friel's play Translations vividly demonstrates, words are tools, and discourses produce relations of power. Change our metaphor, and we may be able to change our institutional models. Change our language, and we may be able to change the world.

I began by quoting one Irish writer, and I will close with another, where again time and place add a certain appositeness to the quotation. With the millennium but three years away - staring us in the face - we can take some comfort from the fact that W.B.Yeats was already worrying about it in 1921, when he published his poem, "The Second Coming"

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

That opening stanza suggests a negative response to the collapse of the traditional model of culture and to the mere anarchy of the market. I believe we can be more optimistic. Given goodwill, the return of cultural conviction and just a touch of passionate intensity, we have nothing to fear from the second coming, the next millennium: - what Yeats called a "rough beast" which, even as we meet in Jerusalem, "slouches towards Bethlehem to be born."4

NOTES

2. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, (1869) ed. J.Dover Wilson, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1961, p.6. [back to article]

3. George Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle: Notes Towards the Re-Definition of Culture, London, Faber and Faber, 1971, p.66. [back to article]

4. W.B.Yeats, "The Second Coming" in W.B. Yeats: Selected Poetry, ed. A.Norman Jeffares, revised edition, London, Pan, 1990. pp 99-100. [back to article]

copyright Robert Hewison 1997. The author has asserted his moral rights.

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