NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 45th episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” It will be available starting 18 October 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.
On Episode 45, François and I talked about words, a continuation of our exploration in Episode 42. We started with community, following on one of our Episode 43 guests, Chris Creighton-Kelly, saying we need to “complexify” our understanding of the word. He pointed out that some people tend to use it in a reductive way, one that obscures internal diversity, and to my mind, can seem mechanistic.
Last time François and I explored words, we talked about Raymond Williams’ wonderful little book Keywords, in which he pointed out that the word community tends to lighten and sweeten things, lacking a negative connotation: the defense community, the criminal justice community, and so on.
François pointed out that “Raymond Williams was right that when he was writing in the early 1970s. The word community was generally seen by most people as positive, and it didn’t come with with negative associations. In the 50 years since, politicians, certainly in the UK, have used it in a slightly Orwellian way. One of the big examples was when the property tax, which was called rates in the UK, was rebranded the Community Charge. Lots of Margaret Thatcher’s opponents rebranded it the poll tax, which was an effective kind of counter-argument, which is what eventually brought down Margaret Thatcher. Today in England, you can be walking down the street seeing a couple of burly people in police-style uniforms with “Community Enforcement Officers” on their back. I suspect people are more skeptical of some of the associations of community in the public domain.”
A good point that also underscores Williams’ point. I guess euphemistic names can cover only so much.
François also drew out the “difference between the symbolic nature of a word and its actual application. When you either choose to belong to a community or are seen by others to belong to a community—or perhaps sometimes seen by others not to belong to a community that you think you do belong to—then you get into much more complicated territory.”
I said that to me, there are two important things to keep in mind when we use the word “community”:
“One is that it’s always in the process of becoming. It’s never completed. Sometimes when some people doing community arts work use that rubric, they say, ‘I’m plugging into the community.’ The feeling you have is that there’s something static, sort of like an electrical outlet on the wall, and you can access its energy. That doesn’t seem to be an accurate description of what’s really happening.
“Second is that we live in a moment in which multiple participation, multiple belonging have just multiplied to the point that if we all drew a Venn diagram of overlapping circles of all the communities that we feel connected to or a part of or tangential to, it would be a very big flower with lots and lots of petals. In arts and cultural work, we’re almost always talking about communities of geography or identity, and it’s super important to pluralize that word: communities. You have to say Jewish communities, you have to say Black communities, and I think you have to say Indigenous communities, and not act as if each were one thing.”
At which point François made a very interesting point about France, where he lives, where “there is very strong pushback against anyone who talks about communities within the national community, because it is seen to be potentially divisive, eroding the notion of a community of citizens that are bound together by Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.” Be sure to tune in to that part of the conversation to think about the way France has, for instance, outlawed the hijab on that basis, quite a contrast with the US. François explained that “in France, it is illegal to gather data about people’s race or religion. That has been the case since the Second World War and the deportation of the Jews, but it’s very problematic because in in Britain, people are very much used to being asked their ethnic identity and other personal facts about themselves. If it’s done properly, it helps an employer to to assess whether they are perhaps unknowingly discriminating against women or people of color or disabled people in terms of their appointments. In France, it’s not possible to know that, because you not allowed to keep any of those records.” I didn’t know that!
We could have spent the whole hour on community, but our next step included three related terms: intuition, discernment, and truth. François and I saw things quite differently here. I see intuition as something to be interrogated. Who knows if a vague unease you feel about someone you just met is your inner guide sending you a valuable message or the fact that the person reminds you of someone you once disliked? You have to inquire within. That’s why I said that “as somebody who works with people in community arts, you really have to cultivate your discernment. That’s one of the things that worries me sometimes when I work with groups of community artists, and often I don’t see that training or cultivation of discernment has taken place.” In the podcast, I offered a few tips on how to inquire that may help you discern whether your intuitions reveal truth.
François pointed out the importance of paying attention to how you feel, which clearly comes before testing your feelings for whatever truth they may reveal or conceal. Then we got into some of the different ways we see these things, which given our usual mood of agreement made for an interesting exchange.
From there, we went on to identity and diversity. (Thanks to Sharon Davenport for suggesting identity; if you want to hear us riff on other relevant words, be like Sharon and suggest them, please.) I shared my pet peeve at the moment with the illiberal identitarian left in the US, which tends to slot people into a few racial and gender categories and treat them as if they form an exclusive hierarchy of value—and sometimes as if they tell you all you need to know someone. And François shared his challenge with the topic: “I’m not well placed to talk about identity, because as a white, middle-class European, non-disabled, straight man, I have lived with the privilege of not needing, not being expected or required to define an identity. Because in our culture, everything that isn’t those things is a divergence from the standard, and I happen to fit the standard.”
In short, a lively episode peppered with differences in perspective and experience. I hope you tune in and enjoy it!
From the late Leonard Cohen “Different Sides.”
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