it's only words (and words are all i have)
DESCRIPTION
Clore Fellow Rachel Grunwald's provocation explored the words we use (and overuse) in the cultural sector. She flinches every times she hears someone – including herself – use terms such as ‘cultural offer’, ‘digital’ or ‘diversity’. Is it time to rethink the language we use?TRANSCRIPT
IT’S ONLY WORDS (AND WORDS ARE ALL I HAVE)
Author(s): Rachel Grunwald
Date first Published: April 2016
Type: Provocation Paper for the Clore Leadership Programme Fellowship 2014-15
Note: The paper presents the views of the author, and these do not necessarily reflect the
views of the Clore Leadership Programme or its constituent partners. As a ‘provocation
paper’, this piece is a deliberately personal, opinionated article, aimed at stirring up debate
and/or discussion.
Published Under: Creative Commons
It’s only word (and words are all I have) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Your use of the Clore Leadership Programme archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use of this particular License, available under Creative Commons.
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Rachel Grunwald is a theatre director. She is Associate Director at SPID Theatre Company,
has extensive experience as a freelancer for companies including the RSC, Southbank Centre,
Hightide, Company of Angels and the Tricycle Theatre, and she was founder and Artistic
Director of the artist-activist group 'Act for Darfur'. She is currently working with Visible
theatre on a new piece about women, fashion and ageing. She tweets as @rachel_grunwald.
For more details please see www.rachelgrunwald.com
This paper was written as a part of the author’s Fellowship with the Clore Leadership
Programme in 2015.
The Clore Leadership Programme is a not-for-profit initiative, aimed at developing and
strengthening leadership potential across the cultural and creative sectors, particularly in the
UK. The Programme awards its flagship Clore Fellowships on an annual basis to exceptional
individuals drawn from across the UK and beyond, and runs a choice of programmes tailored
to the leadership needs of arts and culture professionals at different stages of their career.
This provocation paper has been produced under the aegis of the Clore Leadership
Programme.
For more information, visit www.cloreleadership.org or follow us on Twitter
@CloreLeadership
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ver the past year I’ve become aware of how language can advance or hold back
our thinking about the philosophy and politics of the cultural sector. I challenged
myself to find new ways of thinking through new ways of saying, and what
follows is an account of three thought experiments. The first is an exercise in substituting a
single word for another, the second traces how figures of speech have helped me break new
ground, and the third invites readers to help re-imagine some terms that have run their course.
OI start with that monster term, ‘diversity’.
'Diversity' defines against the powerful. It has come to refer to that large group of people
who are different from those in positions of authority. In that sense it is actually a collective
term for people who are perceived to be weak, a perception uniting people who have
otherwise no place being yoked together - whether that is people of colour, older people,
people with disabilities or sometimes simply people who happen to be women.
Diversity is a nebulous word. A vague, expansive and shady word. When two people have a
conversation about diversity they can be talking about completely different things. It means
everything and it means nothing. Using it suggests a care for everything, but allows you to do
nothing.
This matters. If our language doesn’t seek detail, milestones or a sense of what progress
looks like, it is hard to move forwards. And despite a passionate belief in the transcendent
nature of art shared by most cultural professionals, it’s clear that inequality and homogeneity
are bedding down in our sector.
So, how to move forwards?
I made a breakthrough when I substituted the term ‘diverse’ for the phrase ‘representative (or
‘reflective’) of the make-up of the UK’, and the idea of a ‘journey towards diversity’ for ‘a
move towards a sector which is properly representative of the groups and identities that make
up the country’.
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Of course, this poses questions. Do you aim to reflect your local community, your city, the
country as a whole? Should every cultural activity seek to represent/cater for all groups? But
it means that we can set targets around what an ideal workforce looks like, what
programming could look like (this is key), and who audiences might be. Instead of “We aim
to be a diverse company”, you could say: “We aim to represent the population of the UK as a
whole – specifically this means an equal split of men and women, 20% of artists who self-
identify as living with disability, 12% of people born abroad etc”.
This simple substitution in terminology gives us a benchmark to work from and to hold
ourselves accountable to, and frees us to analyse the situation, and trends, more clearly.
Next, I began to think more deeply about reflection. It is often repeated that the arts hold a
mirror up to life. Now I worry not that it’s a bad mirror but that it does accurately reflect the
world around us. The arts, and by extension our cultural sector, don’t reflect exact
proportions of different population groups, but they do provide a pretty true reflection of how
these groups are distributed across power structures. The world around us does not have
many black people or women in positions of power. It does not have Eastern European voices
sharing their rich cultural heritage as equals. It does not have well integrated disabled and
non-disabled schools. It is city-focused, London-centric, and it has wealthier, privately
educated people of all races in positions of power well out of whack with that group’s share
of population. The arts are a true reflection of our wider world. That’s the really tough
revelation behind the well-publicised, ‘shocking’ fact that they’re not representative of
demographics.
So, adding a distinction between ‘reflect’ and ‘represent’, what we need to do is represent the
whole population, but reflect back a picture of how we want the wider world’s power
structures to look, rather than a mirror image of the status quo. Surely that’s the role of
culture – to assess how we live now and pose questions and alternatives.
Now, how to respond? Once again, words have the answer.
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I noted above that programming is key when thinking about representation, and there are two
metaphors that have helped me in this area. The first is from Jude Kelly, Artistic Director of
Southbank Centre:
Southbank Centre re-calibrates what platforms are available for people to tell their
stories – people who didn’t even know they had a story to tell because they’d never
had a platform. And what to do with the people who’d always thought all the
platforms were theirs?
For me, the assumptions encapsulated in these statements speak volumes. Everybody has a
story. Some stories have historically been repeated more often and more publicly than others.
A shift towards new stories may be difficult for those accustomed to telling theirs. The
structure of an arts centre is essentially a set of platforms which are made available – by
choice – to one group over another. Those choices can be consciously changed to ensure
greater representation of the range of stories in the wider world. Jude’s language recognises
the power in making choices, demonstrates that no choices are neutral, and that no
organisation structures itself by accident.
The next metaphor comes from a producer friend Jeanette Bain-Burnett, and again addresses
the idea of things that seem to happen by accident, or ‘instinctively’:
The canon is dangerous. It feels like a lovely place to be but it’s actually an echo
chamber.
People who grew up on the canon may feel that they are flexing their muscles when they opt
for something in its farther reaches. They may feel they are being daring or brave by
following their ‘instinct’ instead of ‘overthinking’ things. But the noise that comes back to
you in an echo chamber is only the sound of your own voice, and instinct relates to what we
were born with or tastes we developed as young children – it cannot take us outside
ourselves.
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If the canon has an inside wall that bounces noise back, it follows that it has an outside too.
How much of life is outside compared to inside? What and who is on the outside? Whoever
they are, they are rarely heard inside the canon. It’s too noisy with the ricocheting voices of
the people already in there. Historically the people inside have chosen which stories to put on
the platforms; the people they invite onto the platforms will not change without the conscious
re-calibration described above. You don’t get out of the echo chamber by accident. To see
who’s outside, the people inside the chamber will have to make a conscious, hard effort to
break through the soundproofed walls. Unconscious choices in programming can only re-
create the past.
Each individual will find different metaphors that speak to them; these two figures of speech
helped me understand the necessity of conscious recalibration, and the magnitude of the
effort required to break through historically soundproofed barriers.
Conversely, words can hold us back. I recently read The 2015 Report by the Warwick
Commission on the Future of Cultural Value1. It was brilliant in many ways, but I continually
butted up against terms such as: superconductor; galvanise; synergies; interlocking sectors
and creative-cultural continuum. It seemed to me that the authors were speaking the language
of STEM2 with a fake accent, betraying an embedded sense of inadequacy. In a report about
cultural value, they undervalued what we have to offer by making our case on somebody
else’s terms. This was doubly frustrating because a genius for passionate, inventive and
emotional communication is very much at the heart of our sector.
Further problematic phrases I’ve encountered include ‘cultural offer’, ‘production of culture’
and ‘consumer of culture’. Do we really produce, offer and consume culture? Let’s think
what those words really mean.
Production. To produce implies an act of deliberate creation. There’s a specificity and
limitation to it: you produce something. And in many instances this is what we do, but in
1 Enriching Britain: Culture, Creativity and Growth http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/research/warwickcommission/futureculture/finalreport/2 An acronym referring to the academic disciplines of science, technology, engineering and mathematics
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others culture is a process: open-ended, assembling itself, tidal. Offer. I offer new foods to a
child. If my toddler were fussy, the books tell me, I should just keep on offering the same
dish until eventually (maybe the thirtieth time), the child will accept it. I might make an offer
on a property. I might receive an offer of a job. I offer a gift. There’s no parity between the
two parties in those examples, and little suggestion of an equal feedback loop. Consumption.
When I consume something I use it up; when we encounter the word ‘consumer’ it usually
means somebody who eats food and turns it into waste, or buys goods produced to enrich
distant others.
These phrases do not capture what I, and colleagues in the sector, hope to achieve. Isn’t
culture the web of reflections, objects, stories, recipes, sounds, histories, artworks, hopes and
relationships that transcend cycles of production, offer and consumption? Even if we can’t
articulate this clearly or concisely, surely using the terms above anchors our discourse in an
unhelpful, in fact perverse, context?
Some words are plain old inadequate. Take ‘digital’. It seems strange that we have only one
word to describe a fast-growing and multi-faceted field. Here, a paucity of vocabulary is
holding us back, acting as a bottleneck to keep out many people who don’t realise that this
one little word serves as front door to an expansive world.
Other words, once very helpful, have been overused to the point of uselessness. I’m thinking
specifically of ‘creativity’. The Creative Society. Creative Skillset. Creative and Cultural
Skills. Creative and Cultural Industries. The Cultural Learning Alliance. Creative People and
Places. Creative Scotland. Get Creative! I’m creative! We’re all creative! When you next
hear the word, ask what the person using it (even if that’s you!) really means. Do we need to
say it?
If we wish others to believe in the power of what we can do, we need first to demonstrate that
we believe it. This means speaking a language that is uniquely ours – one that allows a
passionate, personal voice to shine through, that eschews jargon from other fields, that has a
democratic commitment to clarity, and that knows where and how to use poetic or richly
descriptive techniques to transport readers and audiences to a new world.
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At this point, especially with reference to ‘cultural offer’, I must admit I’m stuck in my
thinking. I’m frustrated. I flinch each time I use or hear these words, but I haven’t yet thought
of better ones. In that sense this paper is a call to arms. The process of re-imagining our
language may be imperfect, it may be open-ended, but that doesn’t excuse us from trying.
You might find my own language inadequate for this task; I certainly do. You may not follow
me down the avenues my words have opened. But if you too flinch next time you use or hear
one of these words, spend a little time asking what might be better. Perhaps together we can
deepen our understanding of what our words roughly equate to and hence what we can do to
achieve our shared goals.
I don’t believe that words ever completely capture what people are trying to say to each other.
Verbal language is inadequate as a form of communication; that’s never more apparent than
at a time of loss, when well-meaning people endlessly say the ‘wrong’ thing. But trying to
communicate through words is the human project. It’s our life’s work and it’s what much of
art has dealt with throughout recorded history. If we want to break new ground in thinking
we have to acknowledge when our words are inadequate, say ‘thank you very much for
getting us this far’ and seek out other words we can use to make the next, flawed step.
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