describes Helsinki’s Makasiinit, former railway warehouses later appropriated as a site of DIY cultural events until their destruction in 2009, with these words:
Firstly, the rough aesthetics, scars of time, smell of wood and tar and the historic allusions of hand-made bricks, steel trusses and other paraphernalia all contributed to a special atmosphere that attracted users and underlined the value of a different place in the increasingly sanitized city centre. Secondly, the size of the buildings and the rail-yard, their form reminiscent of a town square, their direction vis-à-vis views and flows, and the fluid, sieve-like spatial organization, originally made to facilitate quick movement of goods through the warehouses, are all specific configurational qualities that explain why the buildings were so well-suited for various events and other temporary uses. The atmospheric and configurational analyses help to understand how, precisely, the material artefact of Makasiinit was valuable as a ‘living’ and connected socio-spatial (socio-material) reality. (Lehtovuori 2010, 77–78)
The author never openly claims that the atmosphere of the place can be classified as ‘industrial’, but I think that this is a key element in understanding the fascination that the Makasiinit exerted on Helsinki’s population. The Makasiinit radiated their own industrial atmosphere in an augmented way because they were located in the very centre of a capital city known for its culture and for its political role (and not because of its industry). The fact that the Makasiinit lied a few metres from the stairs of the Finnish Parliament collaborated further in increasing the modality of its atmosphere.
Talking about an industrial atmosphere always implies the reverberation of certain perceived or imagined industriousness, brutalism, roughness, rhythm, murkiness, and noise emanating from street corners, empty buildings, means of transportations, public squares, encounters, faces, appearances, and styles, possibly in all social and material realities. Different cultural traditions and representations created a huge array of narratives about less educated, louder, dirtier industrial city inhabitants, and about their attitude. For instance, in the British context, from Charles Dickens to kitchen-sink films, from the ‘Madchester’ music scene to Coronation Street, the bleak industrial towns of the North have been celebrated as ‘the land of the working class’ (Shields 1991). Even more important is the fact that an industrial city has little symbolic or branding value, when compared to other urban centres. Just by pronouncing out loud ‘Paris’, ‘London’, ‘Helsinki’, or ‘Oulu’, ‘Bochum’, ‘Antwerp’, it is very easy to determine the toponymies that reverberate in our imaginary and the ones that are more anonymous and empty. There is still little place-value connected to industrial cities because these cities were born without proper connotations outside the world of manufacturing and production. The attempt to shift their place-value to culture and creativity is fairly new, and the results have been too unalike to determine their overall success. One of the reasons behind the impact of the industrial atmosphere could lie in this indeterminacy as well, with the difficulty in associating it to a place in particular. The industrial city can therefore be seen first and foremost as an articulation of space, not of place. The post-industrial city has been a sometime desperate attempt to bring the notion of place within this atmosphere and by referring to it as historically funded cultural expression.
Materialities and Emergent Cultural Sensibilities
Marx described the forces involved in economic production as the structure, the real foundation,
on which arises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. (Marx 1977)
This primacy asserted by Marx to the economic sphere has brought to a variety of attitude towards culture, in terms of its production, consumption, and circulation. For instance, Adorno described how capitalist economic forces shape the cultural industry so that, therefore, culture under capitalism can only produce goods to be consumed. For Williams, however, superstructure cannot be interpreted as a mere reflection. The production of a cultural order is always material; it takes places in space, it determines what we are able to see, to grasp of everyday reality:
Cultural work and activity are not now, in any ordinary sense, a superstructure: not only because of the depth and thoroughness at which any cultural hegemony is lived, but because cultural tradition and practice are seen as much more than superstructural expressions—reflections, mediations or typifications—of a formed social and economic structure. On the contrary they are among the basic processes of the formation itself and, further, related to a much wider area of reality than the abstractions of ‘social’ and ‘economic’ experience. (Williams 1977, 111)
Building on the work of Gramsci, Williams affirmed that even at the cultural level, dominant forces maintain their power by saturating practices, meanings, senses of reality, and values into the cultural hegemony. Hegemony is a whole body of practices and expectations covering the whole of the living experience; it is a lived system of meanings and values, a sense of reality, which is internalised and therefore as profound as anything that Marx would make exclusive to the so-called economic base.
Cultural hegemony is not static, it depends on real social processes of selection and incorporation, and it is perpetuated, for instance, through education, family, training, and class. Dominant culture must be continuously made and remade, especially because it cannot exhaust all forms of being and understandings of reality. There are no main modes of production, dominant societies, and dominant cultures, which can exhaust the full range of human practice, human energy, and human intention.
Continuously there are subaltern forces in the making; these are residual or emergent. These forces are residual when they are expressions of the past, but they are lived as if they were present, such as organised religion or rural living, for instance. They are emergent when they convey new meanings and values, new practices, and new relationships. They can also be alternative or oppositional, with reference to their standing towards society as a whole. Alternative forces are the ones that run side by side with the dominant ones and create a parallel space, while oppositional forces want to change society as a whole and substitute the dominant hegemony. Hegemony’s reactions can range from incorporation and attack to overlooking and ignoring, depending on the nature of the subaltern forces. The hegemony consciously and continuously selects and organises cultural practices born outside it.
Art as a form of cultural expression is based on specific activities and relationships of real human beings. According to Williams, it is important to discover the nature of a practice and then its conditions, not its components:
What we are actually seeking is the true practice which has been alienated to an object, and the true conditions of practice—whether as literary conventions or as social relationships—which have been alienated to components or mere background. (Williams 1980, 49; emphases are mine)
According to Williams, the base/superstructure dichotomy was overcome in the work of Gramsci by the concept of cultural hegemony. Cultural hegemony simply corresponds to the reality of social experience in a certain society; it saturates society and constitutes the limits of common sense. Gramsci was therefore able to assert a specific value to culture and, at the same time, to theorise to the possibility of destabilising the dominant hegemony through cultural action.
The bands, scenes, and movements from industrial cities described in this book should be understood as emergent and anti-hegemonic. As we will see, some experiences were oppositional and some were alternative in nature, but they all shared a preoccupation with space.
As noted before, economic crises have a deep impact on the urban environment with regard to decay. Spaces of production might become redundant
