" Three Dimensions: the Cambridge International Arts Meeting "

Keynote Speech

St. John's College, Cambridge University

Sponsored by Eastern Touring Agency - Thursday, August 7th, 1997

I'm very pleased to have the chance to work with you on some ideas about how arts education can make use of some new currents of political understanding.

Why should people in the arts worry about new trends in politics?

The idea that the current government is promoting is "art for everyone."

But what does everyone want?

One answer from Heritage Minister Chris Smith comes with this suggestion the other day,

Cynics will say that Britain is for a Great Artistic Leap Forward with the locals melting down their tin ware to produce peasant sculpture.

If, for educators, finding the teachable moment is the key to reaching our would-be students, then you need to know what people are already thinking in order to teach them the value of the arts that you represent.

Politics is one way of measuring the temper of the people, just as the arts are another way.

Both involve the expressive dimension of life, the shared communication of ideas, insights, fears, and feelings.

Trends in politics can tell us as much about the public mood as contemporary movements in the arts.

And what I want to suggest is that politics is changing,

and in understanding that change there lies the opportunity to reach the arts public more effectively and to make the arts more meaningful to people's lives

which, after all, is what arts education is about.

In an age of glitzy media politics, it's hard to keep in mind that politics is fundamentally about ideas.

Ideas carry people's aspirations for a better world, their hopes of salvation, their fears for the future.

We have just emerged from a fearful time in world history.

As the drama of World War II came to an end, the Cold War was born -- a war that lasted forty years until the fall of the wall in 1989.

World War II was a time of intensely personal commitment and sacrifice, a time of cultural heroism in this country particularly, a time of moral certainty.

The Cold War was, in one sense, far more abstract.

Except for the relatively small numbers involved in Cold War skirmishes in Asia and Africa, the fearfulness came from the nebulous threat of the bomb. My generation grew up in the shadow of the mushroom cloud.

There was a crisis of faith in civilization and culture that came from a sense of impotence before the awesome destructive power of hydrogen weapons, and it was not made less acute by the ambiguity of the struggles in Asia, Africa, and around the world as Cold War politics mingled with the aspirations of oppressed peoples for their own liberation.

Against this background, politics seems to have gone through two phases. First, there was a turning inward -- the surfacing of self-interest in the fifties and early sixties.

One thinks of Room at the Top with Laurence Harvey - a film portrayal of ambition and self-interest.

This seemed somehow to fit with the age of Harold Macmillan and the commercial ethos of the late fifties and early sixties

Then there was the second phase, the losing of the self in counter-cultural exploration and rebellion.

Art led the way in upending the conventional and in exploring the margins of consciousness.

Twenty-five years ago, when my wife and I were in London on sabbatical, pub theater was all the rage, and it was about rage mostly, class rage to be exact.

It was escapism, sometimes with a moral subtext of protest.

The counter-culture of the sixties and seventies unleashed an artistic explosion that was as illuminating as much as it irritating.

As for politics, after a while, it came to resemble low comedy, even burlesque.

But now we are in a new era.

The weapons are still there, but there are fewer of them and far less likelihood of their being used.

The aspirations of the oppressed are still there, but the nation-state is less and less relevant in meeting those aspirations.

We are entering into an age where politics is less the reflection of war than the expression of the concerns of peace: of getting on with life, of reconciling splits, of securing a living and a future, and of preserving the environment and the aspects of culture that give meaning to life.

In this new world, identity has come into its own as a concept essential to the understanding of politics.

Concepts such as class and self-interest that are derived from traditional ideologies and earlier contexts may be declining in explanatory power along with the forms of art and the political movements they have sponsored.

We have seen the end of the cold war, and maybe of the old style of class war.

In recent elections images of youth, energy, and dynamism over-ride traditional class-based loyalties, and even straight material incentives.

In Britain, the U.S., and Canada there have been wide swings between parties which suggests that traditional ideological formations are breaking down.

The point here is to suggest that we need new concepts for understanding the reformulation of contemporary politics, and the arts as well.

Identity is such a concept.

I want to suggest that identity and the larger issues of human development are at the center of this new era of politics, and you can tell me if it has anything to do with a new era of art.

Now a lot of the current discussion of identity assumes that everybody knows what an identity is.

Every author these days uses the term to mean whatever the author wishes it to mean -- and it is often given meanings that have to do with class, race, and gender that serve political purposes that are admirable or not, depending on whether you're in the right, or the wrong, classification.

Rather than moving with the prevailing stream of politicized conceptions of identity, I will ask you to turn with me to the substantive empirical research on identity that has generated such interesting and useful results that we may now draw from it s ome vital political lessons.

In the course of interviewing thousands of people from a variety of cultural backgrounds and circumstances, researchers have established a coherent picture of what constitutes identity.

Social psychological research over the last half century has yielded remarkably consistent findings.

By systematic use of a standardized interview protocol over the last twenty-five years, James Marcia of Simon Fraser University, along with colleagues in many other universities, has established the validity of identity as a theoretical construct.

Beginning with the work done in mid-century by Erik Erikson, and using insights from feminist researchers such as Carol Gilligan, it is now possible to mark out the parameters of identity, and to fit it in with what else we know about human development .

I will summarize this research and focus on its meaning for politics, and for the arts.

What is an identity? The common sense answer is that it has to do with who we think we are. But what does that consist of? When asked who we are, most of us will say three kinds of things:

l what we do for a living;

l what groups, communities, or regions we come from; and

l what commitments or relationships we have to other people.

To put it in shorthand terms, identities are made of:

The first element of identity is competence.

And, when you think about it, the first thing we usually say when asked who we are is ... what we do.

We may stake our identity on competence expressed in a job, a role, or an avocation.

Often, in the next breath, we try to put some credibility behind our claims.

We can't just assert competence, we have to make others believe it.

To claim to be a musician is to invite the question -- tell me where you have performed recently? Competence is established when ability is matched by social recognition.

Competence shows up in politics, believe it or not.

The election of the smart one, the effective personality, the credible performer seems now to be more important than even the issues or the program that personality is associated with.

By projecting an image of competence at the task of winning, Tony Blair was able totally to re-write the program of the British Labour Party.

He gave it a new identity -- now the task is to see if that identity can be made good through competent performance.

What have the arts got to do with competence.

Everything I would say.

Taste in art is about the recognition of competence.

We honor the Old Masters today for their mastery more than for the content of what they represented in their art.

Jane Austen enjoys a revival because she was just better than anyone else at expressing the tensions, the negotiations, the resolutions that make romance so delicate and disturbing.

Performance is about developing competence.

The engagement that comes with writing, painting, sculpting, composing, playing an instrument -- the measuring of self and skill against a score, a plot, an imagined image.

That's the struggle in art, but it is always more than just the struggle to create a specific object, or perform a given piece, it is an essential struggle for identity.

A young dancer for the Pacific Northwest Ballet summed it up: "I think that a performance is always the giving of yourself to the audience.

It's showing them, 'this is what I can do.

This is who I am. What do you think?' "

There, in one spontaneous statement, is the whole connection between competence and identity and the social validation that makes identity authentic rather than just asserted, or invented, or imagined.

Why is it important for the arts to focus on competence apart from the obvious relationships to assuring quality of performance? Because it has everything to do with developing quality in people.

There is a lot about our mediatized culture that, in presenting images to people, takes away from them their sense of self.

Simply being exposed to a virtuoso performance on television can, in one sense, reduce the observer to passivity in the knowledge that any measurable competence of one's own is beyond reach by such a yardstick.

If one's only artistic experience is as an observer, a passive recipient of someone's else's art, there can be a sense of self-diminution, even alienation. That is why, I suspect, we are so hungry to know more about artists -- we are in search of some feature that we can connect with, some way we can make ourselves part of them, and them part of us, so that we can share in their competence.

But to engage in art is, however tentatively, to reclaim the possibility of competence.

It is to open a path to identity.

The pleasure comes from acting, shaping, making, and doing in a way that captures recognition of the work, and of the self behind it.

Art has this radically democratic potential to mobilize the competencies of isolated individuals, of people left behind in the scramble for money and status, or marginalized in a world of hype, pretense, and appearance.

Art can make people genuine, help them find dignity and meaning.

Competence may not always attach to what one does for a living. Many identities are defined more by competence as a parent, than as a mill worker or bus driver.

For many there is little identity in what they do, so there can only be identity in what they become.

Art is the act of becoming a greater person.

The important aspect is not what the competence consists of, but that it be genuine and socially recognized.

There's a joke going the rounds back home.

I discovered it has two versions.

The feminist version is: if a man alone in a forest makes a statement and there is no one around to hear him, is he still wrong?

The chauvinist version is: if a man is alone in a forest and makes a statement, and there is no woman around to contradict him, is he still wrong?

As with all jokes this one plays with a tension in life about competence, a battleground in identity contests such as gender relations.

l Second, identity rests on a sense of integrated-ness within a sensible world of meaning.

So, when pressed a bit further about identity, people describe how they are fixed in the social firmament: as natives of a certain region, partisans of an ideology, believers in a religion, among other cultural and political possibilities.

These affiliations comprise the community element of identity.

And art obviously makes communities.

When you come to a community, that is what a thoughtful person looks for: the cultural institutions, the evidence of expression that shows solidarity and common values.

The museums, the arts festivals, the concerts stake the community's claim to recognition.

That's the obvious point.

But this research reveals something more intricate about community.

The community element of identity stands on two legs.

As individuals, we have one foot in the particularities of our background, our personal characteristics and heritage -- and we have the other foot in something wider, something more nearly universal.

Balancing on both feet constitutes being integrated into a wider community.

If we're all particularity and no universality, we wind up excluding others, and isolating ourselves from the world -- even, in my part of the world, forming militias to save the world from some imagined threat.

If we're all universality, we lack stability and the sense of self that is the key to constructive action.

Here's the challenge for artists -- because that balancing act is at the core of what artists do.

There's the meeting of something particular in the artist with something that can be shared, even of something universal.

Perhaps that is the essence of art.

Anyone can bring forward what is particular about themselves.

And anyone can mimic what is shared or what is universal.

But it takes an artist to make the link, the connection between self and other, between soul and society.

The artist is the agent who makes of work -- a work of art.

Even when we pay that highest tribute to someone's art by saying, "That is original," we mean not that it is idiosyncratic, or merely different, but that the object or the performance finds a new path from self to society.

I've just been reading about the opening of a photographic exhibit of Alfred Steiglitz's photos of Georgia O'Keefe.

To see such a photo is to see something utterly unique, and yet transparently universal.

O'Keefe, her amazing personality evoked by Steiglitz's stimulus and captured in the eye of his camera, makes a new community for all who see the work.

They recognize her seemingly plain self, and him as the perceiver of her essence, and thus themselves, all at once, in a way they had not seen before.

Everyone struggles to make such a connection, to be part of a recognizable community.

To educate someone about the arts is to make that leap possible.

I suspect that will be the lesson of the talk that follows this one.

Art makes community when it is participative, rather than passive.

Some fear that the democracy that participation invites will erode taste and standards.

Perhaps the message from the researchers of identity is that taste and standards follow from the experience of art, they do not precede it.

I had the pleasure of hearing David Eyre lecture while on sabbatical this past spring at St. Catherine's College Oxford.

In recounting his days as director of the National Theater, he was asked what was his best play?

He answered that it was King Lear with Ian Holm.

In explaining why, he said that making a play is like creating a utopia.

You achieve a working relationship between the particular players that models an ideal society where each contributes what is in them, and receives from others what they need to make that possible.

The result is a society that is much more than an aggregation of individuals. Instead of a world where each individual is out for themselves, art can make real the kinetic bond between individuality and community.

l To know someone's identity is to know what that person is good at (competencies), what groups he/she is part of (communities), and, thirdly, what her/his commitments are to others whether through marriage, partnership, familial respo nsibility, loyalty or other forms of mutuality.

Research by Carol Gilligan and other feminist psychologists has made clear the power of this third element of identity for women whose lives are centered in the home rather than in the broader economy.

What was revealed by this research, however, was the deep-seated importance of the element of mutual commitment for men and for women, a finding confirmed by research among both sexes. Women work on mutuality and commitment sooner than men, men tend to put it off until they have settled with a world that demands competence in the workforce, but they get around to it -- though often not very capably for having giving it second priority.

The ability of the arts to educate people about the mysteries of commitment is not in doubt.

But there seems to be a recent trend to trivialize commitment and, in the name of sensation, celebrate freedom from commitment.

The English Patient is not about patience.

Yet it depends who you're watching.

There's the impulsive Kirsten Scott Thomas, who gives up on marriage for passion,

there's Ralph Fienes who trades in loyalty to friends to redeem his passion, but then there's

Juliet Binoche who finds sense in a senseless world by taking on a commitment to the suffering Fienes purely for its own sake.

There is no possibility of passion, nor even of survival.

But it is the commitment that gives her identity when her competence is not enough to save lives, and her community keeps getting blown to bits.

And having identity, she can meet and love Kim, a man of curiously strong identity, built as his identity is on all three legs of the stool -- competence in defusing bombs, a distinctive turbaned community that leaves him capable of igniting a flare to illuminate some art of universal appeal, and commitment to friends perhaps even more than to his love.

Commitment takes many forms.

A culture swamped by sex might be pardoned for taking time out to look for the beauty in Binoche's sexless commitment to the dying Fiennes.

And, I suppose, there is a place for the display of all that is ugly about commitment gone astray.

Such a play is Oleanna by David Mamet, where a man betrays his profession for his private pursuits, a woman betrays her humanity to escape a life of struggle, and the audience betrays its sense of fairness by siding with one or the other of these caric atures.

As you can tell, I didn't much like the play.

What I did like was that in San Francisco where I saw it, there was a discussion after the play that involved the whole audience -- there was an attempt to make a new reality on the basis of play.

Individuals who lack any sense of competence, any relationship to the community, and any form of commitment to others are rightly said to be alienated from themselves and society.

The political implications of the failure of identity are as startling as they are consistent. As James Marcia, the leading researcher in this field, points out: those who lack a solidly developed sense of identity "score highly on measures of authori tarianism and socially stereotypical thinking" and "show a preference for a strong leader over a democratic process." The link between healthy identities and democratic forms of politics is thus well evidenced.

So that is why using the arts to strengthen identity in its legitimate forms is such an intrinsic part of democratic politics.

The striking fact is that these three markers of identity are quite consistent for men and women, for young and old, and for people of differing races, classes, and cultures.

There is a universal need for identity, and while it is worked out in differing combinations and particular forms in various cultural settings, the underlying dynamic remains the same.

Everyone seeks identity in the world, confers identity on others, and shares in the life of the community thereby.

As the research demonstrates, the processes of identity formation and defense have about them a negative side.

There is a pathology of identity formation that arises from discrimination and chauvinism.

By the denigration of differences among categories of people, false superiorities can be asserted.

The scale of behavior that follows from pseudo-speculation runs from discrimination to genocide.

It is this pathology that provides a guideline for understanding negative politics, and, with it, the role of power and coercion in a properly constructed polity. And the purpose of public policy should be to prevent abuses of the developmental process .

Art can expose pseudo-speciation which is the false assertion of identity based on spurious claims of competence for the self, or ones ethnic or racial group, or one's gender.

Art can unmask as well as mask.

Just a the principal purpose of coercion in politics should be to limit the effects of pathologies in identity formation, so the critical function of art is to expose hyperbole, and reach within character or nature to find truth.

That perhaps is why I find two British films to be so illustrative of the critical uses of art: Educating Rita and Chariots of Fire .

Educating Rita unmasks the false elements of the academic world with perfect accuracy, but retrieves the real values of artistic inspiration as well.

Rita and her tutor, the ripened and well marinated Michael Caine, chip away at each other's poses and find delightful human beings inside.

Chariots of Fire shows all the posturings of caste and class that Cambridge is capable of, though it was Caius College, not St. John's we must note, yet what was it that broke through centuries of prejudice -- it was a display of compete nce, of character, of a community that transcended customary affiliations.

The main form taken by identity as pathology is domination.

Murder is the ultimate manifestation of inter-individual domination; rape is another; and the violation of basic rights of self-expression is a broader manifestation.

Child sexual abuse is, for example, highly correlated with just about every significant social malady.

The arts open up not just the possibility of exposing exploitation, but the possibility of healing as well.

Our departmental administrative assistant at my home university is leaving her post to do graduate work in art therapy.

An artist herself, she will learn to use art to bring people out of a retreat from life, to bring them along a path of expression to a new vision of themselves in the world.

The images she will see will sometimes be tormented, but turning the energies of those for whom those images are all too real into images of a world made whole will be her challenge.

Multiculturalism - another form of healing. This analysis suggests that healing the rifts between identities based on separatism, chauvinism, and sexism requires an emphasis on those elements of identity that people share despite their differences: < I>competence, community, commitment. Just as in sports, where racial barriers have been overcome through team play and individual performances that elicit admiration independent of race, so artists can find the symbols, images, and sensibilities that let people see the humanity in each other, rather than the alienation. Indeed, art is the most powerful means we have for portraying the transactive nature of the community element of identity -- that intriguing interplay between particularity and univers ality.