A Culture of Possibility Podcast #39, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard on Readiness to Exercise the Freedom we Still Possess

NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 39th episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” It will be available starting 19 April 2024. You can find it and all episodes at Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net‘s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many guests, focusing on cultural democracy and related topics. You can also listen on Soundcloud and find links to accompany the podcasts.

This podcast moves through several chapters. Two that I think may be most helpful to listeners turn on shifts in understanding that could help people navigate challenging times. One is moving from the old idea of planning as creating a blueprint that is implemented to a framework of readiness to face whatever comes, given that in a rapidly changing world, blueprints don’t age well. The other is the idea of prefiguration: as Paul Goodman put it, “Free action is to live in present society as if it were a natural society,” finding small or large ways to inhabit the world we desire even as it is being born.

But first, we needed to face things as they are. François and I started our call talking about the spring flowers emerging near his home (New Mexico is a little behind France in that respect). Signs of spring are encouraging, but sadly, the headlines these days are not. I told him I was meeting many people who were having trouble keeping their spirits up. He agreed:

“Particularly the younger generation who feel often in the conversations that I have that they’re inheriting a world which is in frightening condition, both in an environmental sense and in terms of human justice. For this podcast, we thought it would be worth first of all reflecting on that, acknowledging the reality of it and the difficulties that community artists, young artists, working with people, community activists now face in what can be a very inhospitable environment. And talking a little bit about whether there’s things that we can do to help ourselves in dispiriting and dangerous times.”

François used to live in Nottingham, England. Something is happening there that seems illustrative of the challenges:

“It’s one of the cities that is in financial trouble after many years of cutbacks from central government. It’s lost about 100 million pounds of its funding from central government in the last 10 years. The city council has just had to adopt a budget that was in effect imposed on them., that sees major cuts to all the discretionary services. So luncheon clubs for the elderly, the arts, social activities, libraries, youth centers, and Lord knows what else. I’m very aware that my friends are going to be scrambling to try to stay afloat, to readjust. The increasing need means these things become vicious circles. So I’m deeply ashamed to be a citizen of the country where millions of people have to rely on food banks, because they simply can’t feed their children well enough.”

Before we started recording, François and I had been talking about the notion of ethical pillars, the values we put first and foremost. I named honesty, meaning keeping one’s eyes open and facing what you see, then representing it to the best of your ability. What we see now isn’t that encouraging, but as I said on the podcast, “there are lots of writers and philosophers and organizers who talk about the importance of hope, regardless of the circumstances in which we see ourselves. If you have any sense of history at all, you’ve seen the wheel turn and turn and turn again, sometimes in very surprising ways. So we can be praying and hoping for the wheel to turn now.

“But one thing that stands out for me is the way that it’s possible to insulate oneself from the conditions that are affecting great numbers of people, just by material circumstance or indifference. Someone said that their fear was that if if God forbid Trump were elected president, a large segment of the U.S. population would be insulated from the worst impacts of his presidency, because they’re comfortable. If they live in a safe neighborhood, if they’re prosperous, if they have savings, if they have good health, then the fact that reproductive rights are denied the people who can’t afford to arrange for them privately or the fact that immigrants are turned away at the border won’t materially affect your life unless you open your heart and your mind and see yourself as a citizen of your world, someone who’s able to respond.”

François said that uncertainty had been an ally for him. “The idea of uncertainty, which I’ve thought a lot about throughout my working life, but particularly in the last year, I find it kind of liberating. If you accept that things are uncertain, then you’re also accepting that they might work out better than you think. Uncertainty is not a bad thing. It’s a neutral thing.”

“A lot of people are understandably finding it difficult to live into not knowing in these times,” I said. “One of the superstitions of American society is this belief that now that we have computer modeling, we have the ability to predict the future in a much more accurate way than we ever had in the past. People tend to seek a lot of prognostication and tend to believe what it’s telling us. In the political arena in the US right now, there’s an awful lot of people saying to abandon hope. That’s definitely one of the possibilities, but by no means the only one…. I like the combination of uncertainty, of not knowing, and of giving randomness its true value in our lives and in our societies.”

François drew on his practice in community arts to point to the humility of uncertainty. “You’re working with people. If you’re really open to their contribution, to their vision, to their ideas, then by definition, you can’t know what’s going to happen. The most exciting part of the work is those moments of discovery when something completely unpredictable happens, and it’s beautiful or wonderful or moving. So I think if anybody should be comfortable with uncertainty, it should be artists.”

He had some thoughts about possible changes in the offing that might shake up the assumptions people have had about their work.

“For a long time, I have met artists who live and work in wealthy countries and artists who live and work in poor countries or where support for the arts is very poor. I have been moved and impressed by the artists who are not willing to let lack of funding stand in their way. A lot of artists do their work because they believe in the work itself. Whatever happens, where they can draw money in to help what they’re doing, they will find it. But if they can’t, they will work in other places or in other ways and use that to subsidize the work that they believe in. I have also met—not very often—artists who work in an environment which is so comfortable that they have a moral or political objection to doing any work unless it’s paid and recognized because of ideas about the status of an artist and the status of being a professional and so on. What I think about that doesn’t really matter. But I do think there is going to be less money around and one of the ways in which we could waste energy is fighting over a diminishing pile as opposed to finding ways of cooperating over what there is. I may well have offended some of our listeners in this: it’s difficult, it’s very painful, and I’m deeply conscious of the good luck that I’ve had, the privilege that I’ve had to be a white man working in a part of the world where the kind of work I do was relatively easy to to get funded.”

This podcast was one where we don’t have a guest; that occurs every third episode. I noted that on these third podcasts, we’ve talked about policy, funding, evaluation—infrastructure of the field that affects people’s ability to do their work. “One of the things we keep pointing out is how the tendency of funders is in the opposite direction from improvisation, appreciation of randomness, uncertainty, and so on, that they tend to want you to know going in what your specific outcome is going to be, how you’re going to reach it. They want you to reduce it to a number, and they want you to follow that blueprint. You and I have said so many times how antithetical that is to work that should be emergent from the people and the conditions in which it’s produced. So let’s just say that if there are still resources around, we hope some of the people who have them will look at uncertainty and emergence and improvisation and possibility in a different way that they’ve been doing in the past.”

One thing we hope community-based artists will do is lead a shift from a tendency to blueprint the future to a stance of preparation, of readiness. I explained that I realized this need based on my consulting practice over the years, where there was a great fad for what people called strategic planning or long-range plans.

“At a certain point I stopped doing them because it just felt like a scheme for using paper. I thought the ones that I did were good, but I saw a tremendous number of them where the consulting firm just changed the name of the town. They were very heavy on boilerplate. I wasn’t into boilerplate, I was trying really hard to make them be generated by and emanate from and in the words of the people who were actually part of the community in question. But it didn’t matter. You could just recycle the paper a year later, because there would be new president, a new funding system, a new epidemic, a new superstorm—a lot of random factors came into play, not whatever the planning assumptions had been. You could read the plan, but there was no chance that you could actually implement it. I started to talk to people about an alternative understanding grounded in readiness: You can’t make a blueprint for the next five years of your organization’s future, but you can examine your readiness to navigate what may come. You can search pretty widely in the landscape and in your own imaginations for possibilities. And you can rehearse those possibilities a little bit, you can talk about the places where you feel armed and equipped to face them and the places where something needs to be put in place to make us stronger.”

We moved on to Vaclav Havel and Paul Goodman, to ideas about living into freedom even as it is endangered or withdrawn. I explained. “In the United States self-censorship is probably the most effective and decentralized aspect of public policy. In the current climate, it’s not only that people are afraid to say things that they think might poke the bear of the state or the Republican Party. People are also afraid to say things because there’s censoriousness of the illiberal left in the United States, cancel culture and so forth. We’re going around with our lips being sealed when we are the ones who actually decided to seal them, because we’ve been persuaded that the penalty for exercising our freedom will be painful for us, and we’re understandably afraid.

“If there’s a growing authoritarianism in the United States, as there appears to be now, and if you look around the globe, there are many more authoritarian countries than there were 20 years ago. As that grows, we also have to ask ourselves, ‘What freedom do I still possess?’ Not ‘What propaganda have I internalized that says my freedom is gone?’ But ‘What freedom do I still possess under the circumstances? What are the ways that that freedom can be exercised now?’ I think that people who do community-based arts work have a big advantage, because even though we may not say the exact words, that’s what we’ve always been asking in all of our communities: what freedom do I have now? How can I exercise this freedom now?”

Nina Simone, I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to be Free.”

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