Engagement in Time

The duration of cultural actions is often considered a guarantee of quality. I defend here a different approach: what transforms people lies in the intensity of shared presence, not in the quantity of time spent together.

Duration is not a criterion of quality

In the field of cultural action and mediation, the question of the duration of actions comes up regularly. The received wisdom holds that one-off actions are less deeply anchored than those carried out over the long term. This conception rests on a quantitative presupposition where “more” would necessarily be better. Yet it is not so much duration that makes the difference as the quality and depth of each action, what I call engagement in time: the way the relationship was experienced, the quality of shared time.

Let us take a simple example. A mathematics class with a sadistic teacher that one endures for four years of secondary school will not have been enriching. This prolonged relationship will on the contrary have been destructive, all the more deeply so as it extended over a long time. To affirm the necessity of longer time to guarantee the quality of cultural actions is to forget the essential: it is not duration that matters, but the quality of what is shared. In a long-term process, things can certainly become more deeply anchored, but this applies as much to the negative as to the positive.

We know this from our own experience: sometimes what we remember most, perhaps until the moment of our death, is a conversation with a stranger that lasted only five minutes. But we were ready to receive, completely open, completely engaged in that time, however short it was. And this inscribed itself in us not by chance, but through this openness to enrichment that our engagement in time allows. John Dewey, in Art as Experience (1934), showed that aesthetic experience is not measured by its duration but by its intensity, by its capacity to engage us fully in the present.

What needs to be worked on, before the absolute long duration of projects, are the ways of being truly engaged and of allowing the other to also engage. This is the question of what creates connection. I position myself here on the side of cultural action and mediation, not of schooling and pedagogy, because questions of temporality do not have exactly the same stakes depending on the context.

Emotion as a vector of anchoring

How can we, as mediators, organisers, artists or facilitators, open up an extreme quality of time in the moment of sharing? The primary objective concerns the emotion experienced, the sincerity and depth of the bond and of the shared object. It also concerns each person’s position in relation to this object, the experience truly lived by each person. Each person having full latitude to engage in their own way, without being told how to do so.

It is about anticipating the journey of the people involved. The situation we propose is one in which the people we address will make a journey, and in which we ourselves will make one too. The goal is there, in the journey, the process. For this process to work, that is to say to enrich the person with a deep memorisation, an anchor planted within them, important to them (and what they do with it belongs to them), there must be the engagement of emotion.

What is emotion? It is not necessarily a negative emotion, like fear or tears, nor a very high intensity. It is an emotion of joy, of discovery, of openness, of surprise, of personal importance regarding what is happening. For emotion to be able to arise, the person must be entirely respected in who they are. This depends on how they are welcomed and how they can journey through this moment of mediation. As Antoine Hennion writes in The Passion for Music (1993), cultural mediation is not reducible to the transmission of content but involves the construction of attachments, of affective bonds that give meaning to experience.

The individual position, the critical thinking of each person about situations always remains, whatever the situation, of course, since we are within ourselves and we think what we want about what is happening. What makes all the difference is whether or not the mediators open a space for the expression of our thoughts. This space is rarely granted, because there is always a fear that a person’s thoughts, if they were expressed, would disturb the established order, the programme of our visit, or the flow of the performance, for example.

Art as a laboratory of democracy

I believe that one of the great virtues of art is to be completely open to everything, without judgement. Everything is possible. Every thought, even the most dissident, can nourish art. But we, in the position of mediation or facilitation, that is to say in the position of power that is ours, must work to ensure that our proposal, if art is indeed this laboratory of democracy that we call for, is fully open so that each person can feel confident enough to make their own journey, bringing their contributions.

It is about allowing each person to elaborate what is important to them in this context, and for this to be expressed, sublimated, through the artistic device, the device of expression and creation, of mediation. One might object that this will produce something incoherent. Precisely not, because it is our role as artist or mediator to create this common ground, this substrate, this common material that will be able to welcome the singular expression of each person, by weaving connections.

If we want to normalise expressions, to make them more homogeneous, this means there is no longer any expression, therefore no longer any art, which in my eyes disqualifies the entire project. If we claim to do artistic and cultural education, there must be art. Yet art is freedom, invention, imagination, discovery, transgression, experimentation, risk. It is this powerful life that will be embodied in the objects we will create, which will then go out to meet other people and which will perhaps make them vibrate with this same power, this same force, this same mystery.

A professional facilitation proposed by artists must therefore be capable of gathering, welcoming, eliciting, authorising art, creation, freedom, that is to say democracy, that is to say contribution to the common with the richness of each person’s singularity. This is why artistic creation echoes the democratic process, the creative and inventive contribution of each person to enrich the common with what they are uniquely rich in. The Fribourg Declaration on Cultural Rights (2007), coordinated by Patrice Meyer-Bisch, affirms that cultural rights aim to guarantee to each person the freedom to live their cultural identity, understood as the set of cultural references by which a person, alone or in community, defines themselves, constitutes themselves, communicates and wishes to be recognised in their dignity.

In respect for the dignity of the person and their identity, and in openness to their expression, this is what we must work towards absolutely, unconditionally. The idea that an artist should come to explain to people how to do things their way is a bad idea, because everything must start from the desire of the participants, from the space opened to them.

Desire as the engine of appropriation

If at some point people want, because it makes sense to them, to extend the encounter by doing things in the manner of the artist they meet, that is very good. But this will only be good from the moment it stems from their desire, because then they will, consciously or not, appropriate in their own way what comes from this artist. Paulo Freire, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), showed that true learning can only occur when it starts from the desire and concrete situation of people, not from what is imposed on them.

As always happens in the artistic domain, we often copy our masters and in doing so we discover ourselves, because we can never copy them exactly. Seeking to copy, through our inability to copy, leads us to journey towards ourselves. But we do it because we have decided to do it, because we place this person or these creations in the position of masters in relation to ourselves. Jacques Rancière, in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987), theorised this dynamic: emancipation occurs when the person authorises themselves to learn, when they recognise in themselves the capacity to learn and create.

We, artists and mediators, must build the capacity to hold this position of emancipatory master for people. But it is they who attribute it to us, we cannot impose it on them. We must open all possible doors and we are one of them. If participants choose to take as master something other than ourselves, there is no problem.

And if our instructions are not followed because they felt like doing something else, let us take it as an opening for us, for learning and perhaps even for artistic discoveries that will nourish our own creation. The techniques I propose here allow engagement in time, that is to say presence to one’s desire for each person, which means that whatever the duration, because everything I describe here can happen in five minutes or in five years, something essential can occur.

The flexibility of devices

We do not have control over what will crystallise for people, nor over when it will happen. We cannot know at what moment something, perhaps very important, will “take”. This can occur in thirty seconds or slowly over a long duration. Everything is possible, everything is open and it does not belong to us.
The only thing that belongs to us is to work towards the possibility of the best quality of time for the people we welcome. This is our main work: our reflection, our preparations, our modifications along the way to our device, something we must always be ready to do. Not to adapt demagogically to people’s expectations, but to, with our own singularity, progressively adapt, be enriched by others and by what happens and, with our personal expertise, ensure that the mediation device always remains open.

This openness comes from the flexibility of the device and our posture in relation to it. The further we advance, the more experience we have, the more precise our devices become and the more flexible they become. This is the whole paradox: the more knowledge we have, the more precise we are and the more flexibility we also have, the more capacity to transform our devices along the way. Thus, we become increasingly capable of engaging others much more quickly in an effective device of respect and authorisation so that each person can fully express themselves.

The more experience we have, we experts and artists open to others, the more capable we are of creating artistic mediation devices, creation protocols that allow the people welcomed to enter more quickly into something essential for them. Our personal journey is there. Bernard Stiegler, in Technics and Time (1994), showed that techniques and devices are not neutral: they shape the possibilities of experience. This is why the design of our devices is a political act as much as an aesthetic one.

Traces as social inscription

We also have another very important responsibility: keeping traces of the processes. It involves using digital tools, giving value to what has been produced, giving people immediate access to what they have produced through digitisation and a simple QR code with which they leave, guaranteeing the permanence of this data in order to provide traces that prove for the person themselves the quality of this process.

These traces are collective, meaning they inscribe the person’s creation in a social space. For example, all the paintings made by participants can be gathered in the same place. This contextualises, this inscribes the person’s creation in a legitimate social space. This is what is extremely important for the construction of the person for themselves, and also for the democratic effect of this artistic proposal.

The digital trace is not only a personal memory. It becomes a common heritage, a collective memory that bears witness to what people have experienced together. This documentation creates a recognition that goes beyond the moment of the workshop: it inscribes the creation in a shared history, it gives it an existence beyond the instant. As Jean-Michel Lucas writes in Cultural Rights, Stakes for Public Policies (2017), cultural rights are not rights to consume culture but rights to create humanity together, by recognising the cultural dignity of each person.

This inscription in a legitimate social space responds to a deep need: that of being recognised as someone who has produced something of value, who has contributed to the common. It is this recognition that transforms a simple activity into an emancipatory cultural experience. It does not depend on the duration of the action but on the quality of engagement and the trace it leaves.

Engagement rather than duration

Engagement in time is therefore not a question of duration but of quality of presence. What makes the value of a cultural action is its capacity to open a space where each person can engage in their own way, express their thought, live an authentic emotion, journey towards themselves. It is our responsibility to create these spaces of openness, these flexible devices that welcome the singularity of each person while building the common.

Artistic creation and cultural mediation are democratic practices. They are so not because they last a long time, but because they allow each person to contribute to the collective from who they are, in respect for their dignity and identity. This is what makes art a laboratory of democracy: not a space where one learns what one should think, but a space where each person can think for themselves and contribute, in their own way, to the construction of the common world, which can take place in 5 minutes or in 5 years, and will find its effects perhaps throughout one’s entire life.