16 C O N T E X T 1 3 3 : M A R C H 2 0 1 4 VALUING HERITAGE My own encounters with value as an academic has been through the philosophies of Karl Marx, Pierre Bourdieu, John Dewey and Jean Baudrillard. Each of these, in different ways, is highly suspicious of the way value functions in wider society. Applying that blend of critique to the enterprise of historical designation has led me to develop a relational theory of value that sees value not as intrinsic but as something that emerges from the practice of its measurement. Quite apart from the reassuring sense we have that value is detected and then revealed through objective assessment and the application of neutral technical criteria, value is regularly subject to political and economic influence. Indeed, there is political bias hidden in the very DNA of selection protocols. This is important because affirming that a particular suite of places is more valuable than another reinforces the superiority of those people who hold such places in high esteem. Preservation lists, to that extent, sanction the perpetuation of wealth, status and privilege because, to quote Bourdieu (1986), ‘The more the official transmission of capital is prevented or hindered, the more the effects of the clandestine circulation of capital in the form of cultural capital become determinant in the reproduction of the social structure’. A relational theory of value is one that also asserts that any kind of judgment of value involves the reciprocal removal of value from something else.This runs counter to the impression given by swathes of public relations material extolling the virtues of heritage excellence in for example, English Heritage’sDesignationYearbook:new highlights from the National Heritage List for England(2012), or Marta de laTorre’s Getty Conservation Institute report Assessing theValues of Cultural Heritage (2002). If value can function only ‘in relation’, we are not simply saying that one thing is good, we are unavoidably saying that one thing is better than another, one building should be ranked higher than another, one application for funding is more worthy than another, and so on. A relational perspective means that valuation is always a zero sum game. Championing the very best necessarily implicates a definition of the worst. David Clarke, a UK geographer and Baudrillard scholar, makes this point when he calls value ‘a conceptual virus spread by modernity’ that ‘accords to a logic of equivalence ensuring that everything can be evaluated and implying the desirability of annihilating everything that is valued negatively’ (2010). If we accept that our historic landscape is not representative of all the diverse people and their stories that landscape purports to reflect (see Trouillot 1995, Burnham 1995, Smith 2006); if we accept, as the listing agencies themselves acknowledge, that not every community has been equally well served by the enterprise of historic designation, we must think about how value’s measurement works to inadvertently exclude. An important clue to this is offered by Marx who says that in a capitalist society value must appear as other than what it is. ‘[Value] does not stalk about with a label on its forehead, but it requires forms other than itself in order to stalk about at all’ (from Henderson 2013). In the historic built environment the proxy that allows value to operate is significance. In the USA, significance is measured against four criteria linked to history, architecture, culture and archaeology. In the UK, the formal grading system pivots on the term ‘interest’, quantified as ‘special’ at the Grade II level, ‘more than special’ at the Grade II* level and ‘exceptional’ for those sites listed at Grade I. The term significance makes a central appearance in English Heritage’s guiding document Conservation Principles: policies and guidance as Principle 3 (‘Understanding significance of places is vital’) and Principle 4 (‘significant places should be managed to sustain their values’) (2008). It also appears as a management tool in the National Trust through a soon-to-be-compulsory roll-out of narrative statements of significance across the trust’s entire portfolio. Significance is made rather than detected. It is made in ways that are subject to the interests of power in at least five different ways. First, contemporary frameworks of valuation emerged after original entries had been made and somewhat inevitably therefore function to validate the presence of those entries and by association naturalise the messages (colonial confidence, strict gender, racial and class hierarchies) those entries espouse. Second is the assertion of a higher particular view as a universal one. When Bourdieu (1986) published his essay on the forms of capital, he noted how everything that escaped economics as a means of measuring quality A national historic landmark plaque for Angel Island A historic district marker in NewYork City References Bourdieu, P (1986) The Forms of Capital in Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education, ed J G Richardson, Greenwood Press, NewYork Burnham, P (1995) How the Other Half Lived: a people’s guide to American historic sites. Faber and Faber,Winchester, Mass Clark, K, and Maeer, G (2008) ‘The cultural value of heritage: evidence from the Heritage Lottery Fund’, Cultural Trends, 17(1) David B Clarke (2010) ‘The limits to value’ in Smith, S J, and Smith, S (eds) (2010) The SAGE Handbook of Social Geographies. SAGE Publications de la Torre, R M (2008) Assessing theValues of Cultural Heritage, Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles English Heritage (2008) Conservation Principles, Policies and Guidance English Heritage (2013) DesignationYearbook: new highlights from the National Heritage List for England, Bristol Gibson, L, and Pendlebury, J R (eds) (2009) Valuing Historic Environments, Ashgate Publishing Far right: US designation for a SouthWales valleys industrial town
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