Conclusion: Meaning: Bringing Possibility into Reality
This Reader began with a question: Why do we make festivals? It now returns to a more fundamental question: What kind of world are human beings capable of bringing into reality?
Scheler’s distinction between reality and possibility offers a way to understand this question. Human beings are not confined to accepting the world exactly as they encounter it. They can perceive that a condition could be different, recognise a value that has not yet acquired social form and orient their actions towards a possibility that does not presently exist.
A possibility, in this sense, is not simply a prediction based upon the continuation of current conditions. Nor is it a complete utopian design waiting to be imposed upon society. It is something that becomes perceptible within the tension between what exists and what ought—or could—exist. This tension enables human beings to judge present reality, imagine an alternative and take responsibility for bringing part of that alternative into the world.
This is one of the sources of meaning. Human beings create meaning when they use their distinct capacities to transform a possibility into reality: by producing something, encountering and experiencing someone or something, or choosing a meaningful stance towards conditions they cannot change. In doing so, they alter not only the external world but also themselves.
The same movement is possible collectively. Societies are not restricted to reproducing the relationships, institutions and uses of power they have inherited. They can recognise that another way of living together is possible. But a meaningful shared world cannot be designed by one authority and assigned to everyone else. It emerges when distinct people perceive meaning potentials, exercise judgement, assume responsibility and coordinate their contributions through relationships.
Care creates the conditions for this co-creation. It protects connection without demanding sameness. It allows difference, dialogue, boundaries, contribution, conflict and repair to remain possible. It asks who carries the costs of a decision, who receives its returns, whose reality remains unseen and whose agency needs to be protected or developed.
Power is indispensable to this movement. Without power, a perceived possibility may remain only an intention. Human beings need power to decide, create, protect, resist, organise and transform conditions. The question is therefore not whether power should exist, but what it serves and how it is exercised.
Across the chapters of this Reader, one principle recurs: the more power a person, organisation or institution holds over the conditions of others’ lives, the greater its responsibility to perceive the consequences, respect limits and protect others’ capacity to act and to recover. The same principle applies at the scale of societies. When relationships between parties of very unequal power, such as a government and the citizens who protest against it, or a state and a people it dominates or exploits, are described simply as a conflict between two sides, the language of symmetry conceals an asymmetry of power and therefore of responsibility. Greater power does not free the weaker party of all responsibility, but it places the greater responsibility on those who can alter the conditions of others’ lives.
Power shaped by care does not use people, communities or living systems merely as instruments for somebody else’s purpose. It makes consequences visible, connects authority with responsibility, enables people to exercise their existing power and supports empowerment over time. It protects the regenerative capacities upon which future action depends. In this way, power can become the capacity through which a more just and meaningful possibility acquires social form.
A world in which care is prioritised and power is used for meaningful purposes is therefore possible. It is not guaranteed. Human beings can also choose indifference, domination, exploitation and short-term advantage. Care cannot remove freedom or make the meaningful choice on behalf of another person. It can help make that choice perceptible, credible and possible to realise.
Festivals have a distinctive role within this movement. Through art, they can reveal what habitual perception leaves invisible: suffering that has been normalised, beauty that has been overlooked, destructive patterns treated as inevitable and possibilities for living together that have not yet found language or form.
Yet festivals do more than represent possible worlds. They create temporary social and cultural environments in which some elements of those worlds can be experienced and practised. Their ways of communicating, distributing costs and returns, forming expectations, exercising power, enabling participation and relating to places determine what kind of possibility they bring into reality.
This does not mean that festivals—or the cultural field as a whole—can claim the power to change the world. Such a claim would disregard the scale of the forces shaping political, economic, social and ecological conditions. It could also turn responsibility into an unlimited demand, encouraging cultural organisations and already committed people to carry costs that exceed their authority, resources and capacity.
The existential perspective developed in this Reader leads to a more proportionate conclusion. Human freedom always operates within conditions. A person, organisation or festival is not responsible for everything that needs to change. They are responsible for perceiving what the situation asks of them, recognising the power and limits they actually possess and making the most meaningful contribution available through their distinct capacities.
For a festival, this contribution may involve making an unseen reality perceptible through art, changing the conditions under which people meet, creating a fairer relationship with artists or workers, enabling a community to exercise agency, using institutional influence responsibly, protecting a place or bringing people and organisations into a relationship through which further action becomes possible. None of these actions transforms the whole world. Each can alter a particular field of relationships and possibilities.
Care therefore protects responsibility from two opposite distortions. The first is powerlessness: the belief that because a festival cannot change everything, it has no meaningful responsibility. The second is omnipotence: the belief that cultural work must compensate for every social, political and ecological failure. A caring festival neither withdraws from the power it possesses nor claims power it does not have.
PROPORTIONATE RESPONSIBILITY
- Responsibility is not the duty to change everything · It is the commitment to use the power one actually possesses in response to what matters.