The New Myth of Relative Social Engineering

We see it as an ‘occurrence’, a spontaneous play of conflicting forces that constantly short-circuit one another and seek out synergies. The role of politics has been reduced to merely ‘policing’ the orderly course of this play of forces, without the ambition to want to guide it, as was the case during the heyday of the socially engineered society.2 Nonetheless ‘social engineering’ still treads the societal stage. Monitoring, after all, also concerns the safeguarding of the essential conditions for the societal occurrence, such as parliamentary democracy, press freedom and the free circulation of goods and capital, conditions that the ‘police troops’ of the global world order defend with force if necessary.

Remarkably, however, De Cauter also immediately puts the brakes on his call for a ‘repoliticization’ by immediately speaking about a ‘relative’ social engineering. At first glance this defensive approach is understandable. To again advocate total social engineering would not only be unacceptable, but above all not credible, given the current consensus on the causal link between social engineering and totalitarianism. The social engineering of society has become an anathema over which hangs a corny paternalist haze. De Cauter’s emphasis on the relative, however, is more than merely strategic. With it he expresses the more general conceptual movement to make thinking and acting in terms of a utopia – the framework within which attempts at social engineering were invariably undertaken – acceptable once more by no longer viewing it as a ‘guiding-image’, but as a ‘counter-image’. The term utopia no longer refers to the representation of an alternative model of society as the guiding thread for a political project. On the contrary, it is understood in terms of an ‘unceasing indictment’ against the inequities intrinsic to the existing world order.3

De Cauter himself seems not to believe in the possibility of repoliticizing the global world order. Within his train of thought, critical counterforces can at most make an ethical appeal to the global order to better control its excesses – what on closer examination is also the bas ic position of the ‘global governance’ movement.4 This assumes that the global world order is not infallible, but is capable of regulating its own shortcomings, without external political interference. The assumption is that globalization, in its current, neoliberal form, is an inevitable, quasi-natural process, which at most requires the stipulation of certain ethical (behavioural) codes. A defining feature of these ethical codes is that they are drawn up by the parties involved themselves. Think of the Dutch publicly traded corporations that recently formalized their own behaviour with the famous Tabaksblat Code. Alternative globalization ethicists, like De Cauter, can at most exert pressure to accelerate this natural process of self-regulation.

It is precisely this ultimate naturalization of the global order that needs to be combated. A merely ethical counterposition is not sufficient for this purpose.5 What is needed is a political critique of the global world order: the global world order must be stripped of any pretence of naturalness by critically reconstructing its ‘socially engineered’ character, as well as exposing the last fragments of utopian thinking that lend this order its coherence.6

Relative social engineering acquires a perverse quality in that societal actors may have more room to give free rein to their creativity, but under the strict condition that they not only be creative, but exploit their creativity in the correct, enterprising way. If they fail to do this, disciplinary sanctions follow. In the process the Dutch government, in the area of cultural policy, is increasingly taking on the guise of the Dragons’ Den venture capitalists: the financial resources of ‘uncreative’ breeding grounds are implacably slashed or even cut off entirely, with the resulting available budgets being reinvested in so-called ‘points of excellence’. These are top cultural institutions from which a high ‘return value’ is expected in the area of international allure, economic suitability or societal benefit. This modus operandi represents, within culture policy, the variant of the previously mentioned National Spatial Framework.

This far-reaching government interference in the field of culture in the Netherlands is anything but an isolated case. On the contrary, it is the local version of the philosophy of relative social engineering that prevails on a global scale today. Think, for example, of the way Western powers, in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq or Palestine, are actively creating the right conditions for the facilitation of the innate thirst for democracy of the local populations. When the population misuses its democratic rights and chooses undesirable parties to defend its interests, such as Hamas in Palestine, extreme sanctions follow and the paternalism of the heyday of the socially engineered society makes a grand comeback.

At lower levels of scale we run into the same politics of relative social engineering. Every self-respecting city in the Netherlands is now hard at work on generating a creative quantum leap. Municipal authorities are frenetically mapping out creative hotspots, redeveloping sites for creative ‘breeding places’, designing policy focusing on creative developments, launching promotion campaigns, mobilizing investments in creative sectors, and so on. Here too, in other words, in spite of all the rhetoric to the contrary, we are clearly dealing with social engineering based on a more or less clearly formulated ideal vision. Only this is done in a smarter, ‘relative’ way. Instead of subjecting deprived neighbourhoods to a total makeover, the Dutch government is performing extremely localized precision operations into the social and physical fabric of the city. These interventions are nevertheless linked to grand utopian expectations. Not coincidentally, the parties involved speak of ‘gentripuncture’ in these cases. In a problem area, like Rotterdam’s Spangen district, creative groups are ‘injected’ in the expectation that their entrepreneurial zeal will restore the countenance of this working-class area to its former glory and spur its residents into action.9 Just as at the Zuidas, here too we are dealing with a consciously created ambiguity about the true engine of the process of societal change. Even though the so-called gentripunctural interventions would be unthinkable without the massive financial and organizational efforts of the government and even though they are part of well-defined policy programmes based on scientific reports, the operation is nevertheless attributed to the spontaneous entrepreneurial actions of creative actors.

In concrete terms, we propose the following. In another context Lieven De Cauter, protesting the harsh immigration policy of the European Union, proposed nominating the wall around Ceuta – along with all detention centres for illegal immigrants on the European mainland – as the culture monument of 1998 (in the context of the Jan Hagel Prize) with as a tag line: ‘Observers predict that it will someday become a tourist attraction.'10 Building on this, we propose nominating the light coercion with which creatives are being sent into ‘the dragon’s den’ in search of microcredits – made necessary by the closure of uncreative ‘breeding places’ and the concentration of culture budgets in elite creative institutions – as the ‘culture moment of 2008’. Without De Cauter’s ethical cynicism, however. We are deadly serious. Today the actions of the government within the creative sector might appear as cruel yet necessary. The future will undoubtedly tell whether this disciplinary state intervention will have contributed in an unprecedented way to the making of a new generation of self-sufficient and decisive creative entrepreneurs, who cheerfully let their creativity be tapped for the dream we all share: a strong international competitive position for the Netherlands within the global world order.