Abstract
This chapter examines eighteenth-century examples of cultural participation as useful challenges to the rhetoric of contemporary cultural policy on cultural participation. The historical case studies suggest new ways of addressing the question of value and valuation beyond utilitarian or instrumental benefits, remind us that the categorisation of legitimate and illegitimate culture is continually in flux, and suggest that cultural participation may sometimes be politically unruly. Examining three case studies—John Dennis’s defence The Usefulness of the Stage (1698), the repercussions of the Stage Licensing Act of 1737, and the Chinese Festival theatre riots of 1755—exposes the complex stakes of cultural participation in historical actuality, rather than only in terms of intellectual history, and broadens the palette of our rhetoric about cultural participation. The unrealised potential of eighteenth-century discourses offers new ways to think about the fuller experience of cultural participation.
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Notes
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Citing Golding and Murdock (2005), who see the economy as political and for whom the balance of private, capitalist enterprise and public or state intervention goes ‘beyond technical issues of efficiency to engage with basic moral questions of justice, equity and the public good’ (61).
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Non-jurors were Anglican clerics who refused the new Oath of Allegiance to William as king and thus were suspected as Jacobite supporters of the exiled James.
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Pleasure is a characteristic element of consequentialist thought, and the intrinsic experience of pleasure as a good equates to utility. On the shift from Bentham’s individual rational utilitarianism to neoclassical economics, Mill and nineteenth-century reconfigurations see Goodwin (2006).
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Morillo (2000) explores the political battle between Tory and Whig writers that encouraged critics to construe Dennis’ egalitarian call to enthusiastic passion as ‘unwitting radicalism’ (23).
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Bourdieu (1984) notes the significance of experience: ‘The manner in which culture has been acquired lives on in the manner of using it;… within the educational system it devalues scholarly knowledge and interpretation as ‘scholastic’ or even ‘pedantic’ in favour of direct experience and simple delight.… Acquisition of legitimate culture by insensible familiarization within the family circle tends to favour an enchanted experience of culture which implies forgetting the acquisition’ (2, 3).
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See also DiMaggio (1982) where he discusses an earlier moment of theatrical legitimation (42).
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Mouffe analyses Boltanski and Chiapello (2007)’s observations on the absorption of the ‘aesthetic strategies of the counter-culture’ (Mouffe, 90) and argues what is needed now is ‘a set of counter-hegemonic interventions, to disarticulate the existing hegemony and to establish a more progressive one thanks to a process of re-articulation of new and old elements into different configuration of power’ (Mouffe 2008, n.p.).
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Although the war in Europe did not formally occur until the following summer, British ships were harassing French trading vessels, over North American colonies and India, as a prelude to ‘the first global war for empire’, the Seven Years War (Fordham 2010, 3).
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Milling, J. (2019). Valuing Cultural Participation: The Usefulness of the Eighteenth-Century Stage. In: Belfiore, E., Gibson, L. (eds) Histories of Cultural Participation, Values and Governance. New Directions in Cultural Policy Research. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55027-9_2
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