| What's Wrong with Emotion? |
Public Culture: Public Communication |
| The Dry Language That Envelops , Cultural Policy in Wales , July 6, 2026 |
When news that the General Strike of 1926 had been called off after nine days reached Edinburgh it met a fierce response. “A cursing competition” said Jennie Lee “I was shocked by the language I suddenly discovered I knew.” The language around culture needs redirecting. Policy-makers need to re-discover the language that they know. “The arts bring meaning, authenticity and joy to our everyday lives.” That is a straightforward sentence. It was written by the Arts Council of Wales. It occurred in a, policy document “Strive to Excel”. The date was March 2015. It is difficult to find language of its kind in the time since. Much else is uttered; much is not to the point. * * * * Francesca Rhydderch has a new memoir published this season In “It Might Not Be True” she writes of the civic library of childhood. “It was at the library that I first realised how a two-dimensional phenomenon- black print on a white page- can manipulate your sensibility into a third dimension: emotion.” The motivation for attending, or participating, in art is emotion. Emotion leads to pleasure. Pleasure is not sensation. In human beings pleasure is a complex high-order cognitive-affective function. The experience of the bifold mind- well outlined by Daniel Kahneman in his writings for a general audience- shows that what may not be of immediate pleasure in the moment proves to be of value in the period of absorption afterward. “The higher emotions of humans are bifold cocktails: skilful blends of physical reactions and language-coded ideas.”* Pleasure- it is a word that is unspeakable by those who determine policy. * * * * Policy in Wales diverged in the first days of government in Cardiff Bay. In 1999 the Labour party in Wales broke with its tradition- that of Jennie Lee- in the United Kingdom. Bevan spoke for the tradition of hedonism which was a strand in the party. Anthony Crosland, the deepest of Labour Party thinkers of his era, was expressive of his party. In 1956 he called for: “a brighter, more colourful country”. The party was not just for pensions and exports. It must have “more open-air cafés, brighter and gayer streets at night…more riverside cafés…more murals and pictures in public places…statues in the centre of new housing-estates, better-designed street-lamps and telephone kiosks, and so on ad infinitum”. There have been so many culture ministers in Cardiff. Dai Smith left an animated account of his circling around the incumbent of his day. He left in his memoir a statement that his Minister “was not deeply interested in the arts for themselves...he did not attend arts events.” Jack Sargeant, the last Labour member to hold the office, never let a word of emotion, or any personal encounter with anything cultural, enter his statements. On a late increase in funding the ministerial statement hailed: “Whether it’s improving accessibility, enhancing environmental sustainability, or embracing new technologies, this investment will help our cultural organisations adapt and thrive whilst maintaining their essential role in Welsh life.” * * * * Carolyn Hitt once produced a programme “the Review Show” for BBC Cymru Wales. It was not on every week. The BBC loved to stuff into own television programmes into it for review. But participants used to go out into the world; they used to respond to things, art, books, performances. They were permitted to enthuse. They could respond, with emotion. Carolyn Hitt was taken inside BBC Cymru Wales and that was soon the end of the Review Show. The producer interest took precedence over the consumer. The makers phone in or attend the studio. They are likeable enough but the editorial stance is promotional. As a listener I yearn for anyone to go out into the world, to see anything, to see a play, a picture, read a poem, and to speak of the encounter with emotion. Wales, alas again, is the outlier when set against Scotland and England. Reviewers there are allowed to see, to react, to speak of how they feel. The banishment of emotion from the airwaves; it is all part and parcel of the way things have to be for cultural life as determined in Cardiff. * * * * On March 9th in this sequence Indhu Rubasingham delivered the Jennie Lee lecture for 2026. It was the second lecture. On 20th February 2025 Lisa Nandy gave the inaugural lecture. The date marked the 60th anniversary of the first ever arts white paper. The Minister opened with “At the Royal Exchange in Manchester she [my sister] and I spent some of the happiest years of our lives watching tragedy and farce, comedy and social protest. “Because of this I love all of it - the sound, smell and feel of a theatre. I love how it makes me think differently about the world. And most of all I love the gift that our parents gave us, that we always believed these are places and spaces for us. “The idea that politicians should impose a version of culture on the nation is utterly chilling. “We believe the proper role of government is not to impose culture, but to enable artists to hold a mirror up to society and to us. To help us understand the world we’re in and shape and define the nation. “I recently watched an astonishing performance of The Merchant of Venice, set in the East End of London in the 1930s. In it, Shylock has been transformed from villain to victim at the hands of the Merchant, who has echoes of Oswald Mosely. I don’t want to spoil it - not least because my mum is watching it at the Lowry next week and would not forgive me- but it ends with a powerful depiction of the battle of Cable Street. “Other art forms can have - and have had - a similar impact. Just look at the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office. It told a story with far more emotional punch than any number of political speeches or newspaper columns. “You could say the same of the harrowing paintings by the Scottish artist Peter Howson. His depiction of rape when he was the official war artist during the Bosnian War seared itself into people’s understanding of that conflict. It reminds me of the first time I saw a Caravaggio painting. “The insistence that it becomes part of your narrative is one you never ever forget. “That is why Jennie Lee believed her role was a permissive one. She repeated this mantra many times telling reporters that she wanted simply to make living room for artists to work in. The greatest art, she said, comes from the torment of the human spirit – adding - and you can’t legislate for that. "I think if she were alive today she would look at the farce that is the moral puritanism which is killing off our arts and culture - for the regions and the artistic talent all over the country where the reach of funding and donors is not long enough - the protests against any or every sponsor of the arts, I believe, would have made her both angered and ashamed. “In every social protest - and I have taken part in plenty - you have to ask, who is your target? The idea that boycotting the sponsor of the Hay Festival harms the sponsor, not the festival is for the birds. “And I have spent enough time at Hay, Glastonbury and elsewhere to know that these are the spaces - the only spaces - where precisely the moral voice and protest comes from. Boycotting sponsors, and killing these events off, is the equivalent of gagging society. This self defeating virtue signalling is a feature of our times and we will stand against it with everything that we’ve got. “Because I think we are the only [political context removed] force, right now, that believes that it is not for the government to dictate what should be heard. “And, to borrow a line from my favourite George Eliot novel, Middlemarch, it means we cannot hear that ‘roar that lies on the other side of silence’. What we need - to completely misquote George Eliot - is a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life.’ We’ve got to be able to hear it. “And this is personal for me. “I still remember how groundbreaking it was to watch Bend it Like Beckham - the first time I had seen a family like ours depicted on screen not for being Asian (or in my case mixed race) but because of a young girl’s love of football. “And I was reminded this year when Maxine Peake starred in Queens of the Coal Age, her play about the women of the miners’ strike, which she put on at the Royal Exchange in Manchester. "The trains were not running - as usual - but on one of my council estates the women who had lived and breathed this chapter of our history clubbed together, hired a coach and went off to see it. It was magical to see the reaction when they saw a story that had been so many times about their lives, finally with them in it. “We are determined that this entire nation must see themselves at the centre of their own and our national story. That’s a challenge for our broadcasters and our film-makers. "Show us the full panoply of the world we live in, including the many communities far distant from the commissioning room which is still far too often based in London. “There are other challenges. There is too much fighting others to retain a grip on small pots of funding and too little asking “what do we owe to one another” and what can I do. Jennie Lee encouraged writers and actors into schools and poets into pubs. “She set up subsidies so people, like the women from my council estate in Wigan, could travel to see great art and theatre. She persuaded Henry Moore to go and speak to children in a school in Castleford, in Yorkshire who were astonished when he turned up not with a lecture, but with lumps of clay. “There are people who are doing this now. The brilliant fashion designer Paul Smith told me about a recent visit to his old primary school in Nottingham where he went armed with the material to design a new school tie with the kids. These are the most fashionable kids on the block. I know it’s been a tough decade. Funding for the arts has been slashed. Buildings are crumbling. And the pandemic hit the arts and heritage world hard.” * * * * Ministers in Cardiff Bay do not speak in this manner like Lisa Nandy. The zones of silence that govern public culture are extensive. These are areas where none may speak. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” *John McCrone “The Myth of Irrationality” Macmillan 1993 page 86 |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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