Chapter 3: Acting in an Unfinished World
Chapter 2 described care as the way a festival takes responsibility for the relationships and conditions through which its purpose becomes possible. To understand what this responsibility requires, we first need to understand the people who carry it: the conditions they face and their capacity to respond. Why should a Reader for festival professionals turn to existential thought? Festival management is often approached through production, finance, scheduling, marketing, risk, governance and evaluation. These fields are indispensable. Festivals must use resources responsibly, fulfil obligations, coordinate complex work and remain economically and operationally viable. Yet management becomes incomplete when the efficiency of the work is treated as more important than the wellbeing and agency of the people through whom the work becomes possible.
Some inherited and dominant managerial logics view an organisation as a mechanism and people primarily as the functions required to operate it. Workers become resources, roles become replaceable units and relationships are valued mainly according to their contribution to delivery. This perspective can produce impressive short-term efficiency while concealing exhaustion, dependency, fear, lost meaning and the unequal distribution of cost. It can also mistake human variability, vulnerability and freedom for problems to be controlled.
An existential approach begins from another direction. It asks what kind of life human beings live, what kind of beings they are and what conditions allow them to perceive, choose, participate, develop and take responsibility without being reduced to instruments for someone else’s purpose. This does not make efficiency, professional discipline or the business realities of festivals unimportant. It places them within a larger question: efficiency for what, achieved through which conditions and at whose cost?
The relationship between effective delivery and human wellbeing is therefore a paradox, not a choice between caring for people and accomplishing the work. A festival that ignores delivery cannot sustain its purpose; a festival that secures delivery by depleting or instrumentalising people contradicts the human and cultural purpose it claims to serve. Care keeps both realities in view. It seeks ways of organising in which people can contribute effectively while retaining dignity, agency, boundaries, meaningful connection and the capacity to continue.
Festival professionals also act without complete knowledge. They plan for audiences they have not yet met, artistic processes whose outcomes cannot be guaranteed, weather that may change, partnerships that may evolve and social conditions that can shift quickly. Human action is always directed towards a future that is partly open. Planning matters precisely because certainty is unavailable. But planning alone cannot answer how people should judge, choose and respond within what remains uncertain.
MANAGEMENT PARADOX
- Effective delivery matters · Human wellbeing and agency matter · Care does not choose one against the other · It asks how purpose can be realised without reducing people to functions or transferring hidden costs.
Existential thought begins with two closely related questions: What is human life like? And what kind of being is the human being who lives it? The first question concerns the conditions of existence. Human life is unfinished and uncertain; it confronts us with paradoxes and dilemmas that cannot always be resolved, and with limits and limitations that shape what is possible.
The second question concerns the human capacity to respond. Human beings do not merely undergo these conditions. They can perceive possibilities, take distance from immediate reactions, exercise judgement, make decisions, develop capacities, assume responsibility and bring something into reality that did not exist before.
This Reader approaches these questions as practical lenses for festival work. They are not included to provide an exhaustive account of existential philosophy or psychology. They help us distinguish the kinds of situations we face, understand the human capacities those situations require and examine the relational and organisational conditions through which responsible action becomes possible. Section 3.1 considers what human life is like through three universal existential issues: uncertainty; paradoxes and dilemmas; and limits and limitations. Section 3.2 asks what kind of being can respond to these conditions through judgement, decision, responsibility and action.
CHAPTER 3 OVERVIEW
- 3.1 What Is Human Life Like? · 3.1.1 Uncertainty — What cannot yet be known or has not yet been decided · 3.1.2 Paradoxes and Dilemmas — What cannot be reduced to one simple answer · 3.1.3 Limits and Limitations — What must be accepted and what can be changed · 3.2 What Kind of Being is the Human Being? — How we judge, decide, take responsibility and act.