NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 42nd episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” It will be available starting 19 July 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.
Every third episode, François and I have a conversation between ourselves. This time, we shared words about words. The two of us being writers and speakers, that’s not surprising.
As François put it, “We’re going to talk about language, some of the keywords that are used in community art, participatory art, in the cultural sector. I’m a writer and a reader and language has always been really important to me. I think maybe also, because I speak two languages, the notion of meaning being contextual is in my imagination from the very beginning. So I think language is amazing. But it needs to be handled carefully. I have always liked George Orwell’s essay about politics and the English language and about the way in which, using words badly is in itself a symptom of using thought badly and eventually using people badly. Now, I think politicians use words badly deliberately. I don’t think many artists do. But we can use them lazily. Or we can make assumptions about what we mean and also assumptions that other people understand what we mean.”
I shared some of the inspirations for this conversation. You’ll see links for them at miaaw.net, the website for our podcast and several others.
“First is a book by the great Raymond Williams, who was an advocate of liberation for Wales, who was an amazing writer about all kinds of culture and politics, who started the Open University in Great Britain. If you haven’t ever read about him, look at the long list of his books that are available and pick one. The one that we’re thinking about today is called Keywords, and the first edition of it was in 1976. He took a bunch of words; community is in there, democracy, art and so forth. He talks about the words’ origins, when they first came up in language, what their root words were in other languages, then explores the uses to which those words are put in society. There’s also at least one new Keywords book, which I confess to not yet having read even though I downloaded a PDF of it, where other people said, well, let’s take some words that have popped up since Raymond Williams wrote that and try to augment it.
“Also, not too long ago, I attended a small meeting of people who had been participants in a community arts project. At a certain point in the meeting, it was pointed out that we were using a lot of the same words, but it didn’t seem like we meant the same thing by them. Some of those were kind of hot-button words. Some people loved them and other people thought they were put to nefarious purposes. So we adjourned the formal agenda for the meeting and spent the better part of a day on these lists of words, exploring the multiple meanings just in a room with a dozen people in it and found a lot of them. So we thought, ‘Okay, François and I bat around a lot of important words on this podcast and maybe we’ll talk about what they mean.'”
First came culture. François offered a capsule history of how the word was understood in UK policy circles, starting as a foreign thing—Britain had an arts council, and European nations had ministries of culture. “For most of the time I’ve been working,” he said, “intellectual debate around culture has tended to be framed in ‘Do you mean culture as the arts? Or do you mean culture as way of life?’ And whilst I understand that division, I think it’s very narrow and limiting. It posits an opposition, which isn’t actually either true or useful. It’s more helpful and useful to see culture as the expression of values, how we do what we do. So we all have to eat, we all have to put clothes on. But the choices that we make, about what we eat, how we eat it, how we dress, and on into all of the things, are different….Culture is the expression of values because it goes right to the heart of what people believe, and how they imagine, right and wrong, and what’s good and what isn’t good.”
I decided to go bigger. “I’ll tell you a capsule definition that feels true to me, although no doubt arguable to many others: we’ve got nature and we’ve got culture. And nature makes quite a few appearances in culture, but still, nature is the dirt, the rocks, the trees and sky, the birds, the bees, all that is given, and including, arguably all that is cultivated, which is one of the root words of culture. And then everything that human beings make and say and do and think and believe is culture.”
I acknowledged that it’s often used in a narrower sense, focusing on expressive modes. “Cultural agencies and commentators,” I added, “they’re focusing on values, as you say, but expressive modes are probably the central nugget of what they mean by culture, because they want to include not only all the various arts practices, but then all the ways people talk about them, and think about them and publish about them and so forth. That’s way too narrow. So I want to use some of the larger definitions. It is important to recognize that culture is always a collective creation. If you live alone on a desert island, you cannot make a claim to having a culture because it involves communication, interaction, co-creation, collaboration, cooperation, communication, all those co- words. It’s something that lubricates the challenge of living together in the same space, either actual or virtual. Otherwise, it’s just the war of each against all. It has to be collective.”
That’s a taste of our conversation on culture, which included a few tangents, as when I introduced “culture building and culture bearing.” There’s a dominant society idea that certain people make culture and everybody else takes. But within the framework of cultural democracy, everyone is in some sense a culture builder, and a culture bearer. It’s also true that, especially given the nature of our societies at this moment with so much virtual communication, and so many different ways of transmitting meaning over great distances, that everybody is a participant in multiple cultures, that together comprise this big C culture we’re talking about. It’s possible that someone has a particular ethnicity and then they’re involved in a particular kind of activity that only a few people partake of. Maybe they’re in the AI world, and they have that whole vocabulary, and maybe they partake of a particular spiritual practice. We’ve got a big flower, like a Venn diagram with a lot of overlapping parts. The important thing to remember is that all of those exist on a horizontal continuum, there’s not a hierarchy.”
François observed that culture is neutral. “If we accept the idea that culture is an expression of values, then it follows that not all culture is good. Culture is like a tool, it gives us the power to do things, to create links with other people, to express what we believe, to find common ground and so on. But it also immediately creates the possibility of dividing and dominating and separating and saying, my culture is better than yours. Part of the problem for a lot of the discourse around art and culture, in our societies is an assumption that somehow culture is good and cultured people are good.”
That took us right into our next word, “art,” which seems to me misused in the same way: “Another one that is often used by people to mean good. Like ‘Did you see that? I’m not sure it’s art.’ I hate that question, ‘Is it art?’ It seems such a bullshit question to me. The people who ask it mean, ‘Do I like it? Is it good?’ They should just say that instead, because they’re doing damage to the notion of what art actually is, which is whatever is created by human beings using whatever skills, whatever materials, whatever mediums, etc., that they intend as art is in my book, art, and I will put a period after that.” François disagreed, feeling that intention is a critical element, and that led to an exploration of different perspectives including examples ranging from Carl Andre to Joshua Bell. That took us right to a key question, gatekeepers: whose definition is it anyway, and what are they doing with it?
We went on to our next word, authenticity, which involves two categories of meaning, one all about gatekeeping and the other about being true to oneself. I hope you enjoy these discussions, and that they help you think about the language you use and come across, and the impacts it has.
And from there we took on a popular word, creativity. What words would you like us to explore?
“Can’t We Talk It Over?” by Betty Carter.
Order my book: In The Camp of Angels of Freedom: What Does It Mean to Be Educated?
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