A few weeks ago, Jonathan Tonkin published a note on his excellent Substack, Predirections, arguing that “we need creativity not productivity”. I obviously couldn’t agree more. Creativity, whether artistic, scientific, social, entrepreneurial, or otherwise, undoubtedly has the potential to provide the solutions we need to emerge from the convergence of crises we currently face.

That being said, I am convinced that this desire for more creativity in our societies is doomed to remain wishful thinking unless we question the imperative of productivity that lies at the heart of today’s capitalist societies. And this is because the very strategies used to increase productivity create conditions that, while not making creativity impossible, make its emergence far less likely.

The conditions necessary for creativity to emerge

The first condition for creativity is a deep understanding of the process as a whole, whether artistic, scientific, industrial, or otherwise. Productivity, by contrast, tends toward the rationalization of that process, or even its Taylorization, in order to divide it into simple tasks that can be easily controlled by management. Employees end up focusing on a handful of highly specialized tasks that, in themselves, are almost entirely devoid of meaning.

Without a global understanding of the process, it becomes very difficult to take initiative or imagine new solutions. And if, despite everything, an employee does come up with a genuinely original idea, it will often be suffocated by the countless rules that govern organizations and by hierarchical structures that strip workers of their agency.

It is no coincidence that, in one of the most influential educational theories of the past century, creating occupies the highest level of cognitive development. Bloom’s Taxonomy organizes cognitive processes as follows: (1) remember, (2) understand, (3) apply, (4) analyze, (5) evaluate, and finally (6) create. Too many organizations are designed to keep employees operating at levels (1), remembering, and (3), applying, in order to maximize productivity, depriving themselves of their workers’ initiative and inventiveness.

Creativity also requires trust. The more a superior authority tries to control a creative process, through endless checkpoints for example, the less innovative the final project is likely to become.

It is often counterproductive (!) to explain a creative process while it is still unfolding, because being forced to verbalize it too early can undermine one’s confidence in the ideas themselves. Many creative decisions rely on intuition. Until a process has fully matured, it is often impossible to demonstrate rationally that the chosen direction is the right one. A question asked at the wrong moment can extinguish the fragile flame at the heart of a creative process.

The person, or persons, carrying a creative project usually possesses the deepest understanding of it. They know the intuitions, the failed experiments, and the delicate balances that have brought the work to where it is. Questioning certain aspects of the process can easily derail it—or, at best, steer it toward a diluted version of its original vision. Fans of The Lord of the Rings know that the creative freedom granted to Peter Jackson and his team, then relatively unknown and working far from Hollywood, played a crucial role in making the trilogy the singular work that it became. By contrast, The Hobbit bears far more of the marks of a production shaped by producers’ expectations and by the conventions of mainstream filmmaking in the United States.

Creativity also requires a great deal of time and resources. New ideas do not appear on command. More often than not, they emerge through an unpredictable process of trial and error. You cannot order an idea to grow faster. You can only create the conditions in which it is able to emerge. Once again, this runs directly counter to the logic of productivity, which seeks maximum return on investment as quickly and as predictably as possible, encouraging decisions driven by short-term thinking.

Creativity also demands risk-taking and adaptability. It is, by nature, an exploratory process, one that consists precisely in not knowing the answer beforehand. Bringing a new idea into the world necessarily requires the ability to adapt, and success is never guaranteed. You have to try it to find out. Once again, this runs directly against the fear of change and the aversion to risk that characterize most organizations, so obsessed as they are with productivity and performance.

I could keep extending this list for quite some time. Creativity also requires mental space, boredom, psychological safety, unexpected encounters, multidisciplinarity, and communities where ideas can circulate freely. All of these conditions are likewise undermined by capitalism. I will come back to it as each of them deserves an article of their own.

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Like a bicycle that must keep moving in order not to fall over, capitalism must continually grow in order not to collapse. Within such a system, it becomes imperative to keep squeezing the lemon ever harder in order to extract ever more productivity.

Does this mean that capitalism is simply not fertile ground for creativity? Yes, but it is not quite that simple. After all, isn’t the iPhone a remarkable feat of creativity and ingenuity?

I would argue that capitalism is indeed capable of being creative, but only when it is forced to generate new products, new needs, new problems, in short, new opportunities to make us spend money and thereby sustain its own growth. Billionaires invest staggering amounts of money in artificial intelligence, employing armies of highly creative people, only because it promises to be enormously profitable, not because it necessarily addresses our societies’ most urgent needs.

Left to itself, the market struggles to mobilize resources to solve problems that offer little prospect of profit. Yet these are precisely the problems to which we urgently need to devote all of our creativity if we hope to emerge from the multitude of crises we are currently facing.

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What are we collectively giving up by continually submitting ourselves to this imperative of productivity? What is its opportunity cost? In other words, what future is it preventing from coming into existence?

The thought is dizzying because it seems obvious to me that our collective capacity to be creative, to solve problems, and to mobilize ourselves is vastly underused. Despite its extraordinary ability to extract people’s time and energy, the capitalist system is profoundly inefficient at recognizing, nurturing, and unleashing human potential. I believe that, individually and collectively, we are only a pale version of what we could become under different circumstances.

Every day I see fascinating and extraordinarily talented creators who cannot sell their work or secure the support and resources they need to practice their art. I see freelance workers with original ideas struggling to monetize their work. I see researchers unable to obtain funding for projects that are nonetheless crucial, promising, and desperately needed. Consider rare diseases: how many receive little or no attention from pharmaceutical companies simply because the market is too small? And yet the people living with these diseases deserve our attention just as much. They pay the price of this imperative for profitability with their lives.

In reality, the capitalist system prides itself on being productive while it forces creators to spend most of their time trying to convince others of the value of their research, their creative projects, their ideas, even of their very right to exist. I know this all too well. I spend a mind-boggling amount of time filling out grant applications and applying for opportunities instead of actually creating.

Creativity requires that resources be available precisely when ideas need to be explored, yet those resources have become extraordinarily difficult to access. How many artists, freelancers, researchers, and immensely gifted people throw in the towel every year, shrink themselves, and ultimately mold themselves to the expectations of the system simply to survive?

Every time someone gives up, every time a project is abandoned, it is not only that individual who loses. We all do. Our societies forfeit the opportunity to benefit from that person’s potential. Every time we sacrifice the conditions necessary for creativity in the name of productivity, we lose more than just an idea, we lose one more possibility of creating a better future.

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The other morning, while drinking my coffee, I made the beginner’s mistake of reading the comments beneath an article. I was shocked by the violence, by the staggering number of intellectual shortcuts, by the abyss between my values and the ones reflected in those comments. When I finally sat down to work afterward, all of my projects suddenly felt terribly futile. What possible difference could my music or my writing make in such a violent world? In a sense, I experienced a crisis of faith—in myself, in my goals, and in society’s capacity to transform into a better version of itself.

Fortunately, life has a way of providing exactly what we need. A few hours later, while absentmindedly leafing through one of the many books scattered around my office, I stumbled by chance, or perhaps through a bit of synchronicity, upon exactly the passage I needed to read at that particular moment. It came from Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit, a book that has already rescued me from despair more than once. I then sat down and wrote this essay as a way of exorcising that gloom.

She argues that one of the mistakes many activists make is expecting their efforts to result in “a definitive conclusion, direct cause-and-effect relationships, on instant return on investment.” Such expectations run contrary to the very nature of activism and engagement, inevitably leading to “disappointment, bitterness, and defeatism.” She could not have described more accurately what was happening in my own mind that morning.

Beyond reading the comments in the first place, my real mistake was judging my projects and my commitment through the values of capitalism—that is, through the lens of return on investment and rapid results. The truth is that activism and civic engagement rarely produce immediate or direct effects. Their influence is indirect. It belongs to the realm of the intangible, the symbolic, political discourse, and the collective imagination. Solnit is speaking specifically about writing here, but I think her words apply to many forms of engagement: “An essay, a book, is just one statement in a long conversation we might call culture [...]. You write a book, you plant your seeds”. They may blossom, perhaps, but only later.

Rebecca Solnit reminds us that engagement is not about eliminating evil, which is impossible anyway, but about the daily, active practice of cultivating good. It is not something we do once and for all. It is something we do every day, for an entire lifetime. Anyone can go on a diet and lose weight in a few weeks; the real challenge is maintaining healthy eating habits and regular physical activity over the course of a lifetime. The moment we stop, we begin to lose. (Well, we lose muscles and gain fat…anyway you got the analogy !)

Activism, engagement, adopting anti-capitalist habits, resistance—call it whatever you like—is often described as a duty. Yet, like physical exercise, it can also be “a pleasure, an education, a revelation.” It allows us to feel fully alive, to reclaim agency over our own lives, to translate our concerns about society into concrete actions. By definition, it is active, participatory, and relational. It is an act of defiance against a capitalist society that would rather have us domesticated, docile, and passive. It is a way of reclaiming our agency.

Whenever I feel paralyzed by the magnitude of the task before us—the task of building the future we wish to inhabit—I return to the wise words of Paul Goodman: “Suppose the revolution you’ve been talking and dreaming about has happened. Suppose your side has won, and you have the kind of society you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now.”

My artistic practice and my work on this project, Art, Joy & Uprising, take place mostly in solitude, far from the spotlight. Most of my projects unfold over several years and their completion often feels distant. As I’ve mentioned before, the financial return is irregular and generally nowhere near proportional to the amount of work involved. Without pretending that everything I create is necessarily a form of activism or engagement—sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t—Solnit’s reflections on success resonated deeply with my own questions about what success actually means.

She argues that we need to redefine success when we talk about activism, civic engagement, anti-capitalist practices, or even writing itself. Success is not more—it is less. Or rather, it is balance. It is rarely spectacular, and often difficult to perceive.

To illustrate this, Solnit points to environmental victories. The outcome of these long struggles is that nothing happened. “The land wasn’t annexed by the military, the mine didn’t open, the factory didn’t spew effluents”. Perhaps someone, after reading a book, watching a film, or attending a play, chose not to do something. Perhaps they made a different decision than they otherwise would have. The writer or artist will never know about it—and that does not invalidate the work that was done.

Also, perhaps our definition of success remains too masculine, in the Western, heteronormative sense of the word (which I obviously reject). To explain what I mean, I’d like to share something my mother told me when I was a child, something that helped me understand the profound injustice experienced by women because of the kinds of work traditionally assigned to them.

She said that the difference between work society labels as masculine and work it labels as feminine is this:

“You notice a man’s work when it has been done. You notice a woman’s work when it hasn’t.”

When a building is completed, we celebrate the builder. But we only think about the person who cleans the bathrooms once they begin to smell. Masculine work is visible. Feminine work is invisible. It is an astonishingly concise piece of wisdom, and I will remain grateful to her for it all my life.

Perhaps the success of our engagement, of adopting anti-capitalist habits, necessarily lies in accepting invisibility, intangibility, and the fact that the fruits of our efforts may arrive quietly, without fanfare. How do we continue acting when we know we may never witness the results of our work? If we want engagement to become a lifelong practice rather than a brief burst of enthusiasm, perhaps the posture we need is not that of a revolutionary or an entrepreneur, but that of a mother, a guardian, or a cargiver. Or perhaps that of the Khasi people of Meghalaya, who cultivate living bridges by patiently guiding the roots of fig trees over generations, knowing they will likely never see the finished work. (Like on the photo on top of this article !)

I will end with, once again, Solnit’s own words: “In a way, capitalism is an ongoing disaster anticapitalism alleviates, like a mother cleaning up after her child’s mess [...]. Noncapitalist ways of doing things are far older than the market economy. [...] What we dream of is already present in the world.”

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A few weeks ago, I was at a concert when I ran into a composer friend I hadn’t seen in a long time. Happy to reconnect, we decided to grab a drink and catch up on our respective lives.

The conversation naturally drifted toward our professional struggles. After all, composers tend to be rather solitary creatures, and it is not every day that we have the opportunity to share our experiences with colleagues who fully understand our reality.

Long story short, we found ourselves lamenting about symphony orchestras that show little interest in living composers, grants that are increasingly difficult to obtain, organizations that commission less and less ambitious works, media outlets that pay little or no attention to our art form, and so on.

What options do we have left? University positions are extremely difficult to obtain, and the workload leaves very little time for creation as administration and fundraising take up an ever-growing share of professors’ time. Monetizing our art is difficult, online platforms pay next to nothing, and recordings are becoming increasingly expensive to produce. Above all, it is difficult to find an audience when we are all drowning in an ocean of content.

What began as a conversation filled with frustration and exasperation gradually became tinged with despair. We started talking about all the talented and hardworking artists we know, with résumés impressive enough to make anyone blush, who, year after year, abandon ship and reinvent themselves (a slight urge to throw up rises in the back of my throat whenever I think of the pandemic years, when that word was used relentlessly and often in deeply unfair contexts) in fields that are more stable, better paid, and less competitive.

I’ve had this conversation an incalculable number of times. It plays like a movie in my head. I can predict what the other person is going to say because the discussion always follows the same trajectory. And, as usual, crushed beneath the enormous weight of this broken system, the conversation eventually dissolved into a kind of wishful thinking. We found ourselves hoping that a visionary new conductor might one day take over the OSM, or that a progressive party might finally win an election and open the floodgates of public funding, or that Radio-Canada’s leadership might change the course of the organization.

For people who claim to be creative, I have to admit that we had very little to offer in terms of solutions beyond the obvious and highly improbable band-aids I just mentioned.

But I am genuinely tired of these conversations always ending in the same cynical despair. Today, I want to push it further. I want to name the real problems and try to imagine solutions. To do so, I would like to completely shift perspective and ask the following question: what if the system is working exactly as intended?

To say that the system is broken implies that it once worked, that it no longer fulfills its intrinsic purpose. Yet the more I reflect on it, the more I believe that the system we live in fulfills its purpose perfectly. Its function is to ensure that artists remain neatly confined within boxes it has carefully defined for them, preventing any kind of synergy from emerging between us that might challenge its existence. It rewards art that reinforces its power, like commercial art governed by the market or institutional art that is easy to control. Meanwhile, it economically precarizes and marginalizes artists who attempt to think and create outside capitalist values.

In his wonderful essay Pour nous libérer les rivières (To Free Our Rivers), Hugo Latulippe captures the potential that the system seeks to suppress:

Art calls forth the flourishing of a collective way of life. It contains the potential to build a society that would become capitalism’s worst enemy: a society that places life at the centre of its project, a society that is ecological, feminist, egalitarian, and deeply of its time.

Art allows us to tell other histories, beyond the linear and inevitable narrative that globalization tries to force down our throats. Art allows us to elevate other public figures of the present, breaking the hegemony of celebrities and billionaires who dominate public space. Art allows us to reflect on the future we wish for ourselves, thus offering an alternative to the future capitalism wants to sell us.

Artists are dangerous because they expand the realm of possibilities, because they make other worlds imaginable. Capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy or the Euro-Christian mentality as Bispo dos Santos would call it, you can call it whatever you want, do everything they can to prevent that from happening. The system commodifies, standardizes, and aestheticizes art for the elite.

It certainly does not offer artists a meaningful platform. And when it does pay attention to them, it is often on the condition that they remain harmless. The conversation will focus on their personal lives, their relationships, their skincare routines, or their clothes rather than the ideas they carry, the questions they raise, or the vision of the world they propose.

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So what do we do now?

I would like to move beyond a victim mentality, beyond simply complaining and waiting for things to change. If the system is designed to silence us, then our task is not to beg for a place within it but to invent another one. That is, in some ways, what I am trying to do with this project. I encourage everyone to learn as much as possible about these issues, to talk about them openly, and to speak up whenever possible.

Reflecting on these questions has also had an impact on my artistic practice. I am trying to be clearer in what I say so as not to exclude people who are unfamiliar with the codes of contemporary art. I am trying to communicate in a more direct and impactful way, to create emotional experiences. I am exploring different ways of presenting my work outside traditional venues. I collaborate with people whose practices differ from my own. I constantly ask myself how I can do more with the resources available to me. It is a work in progress, and I will return to it in greater detail.

As I mentioned in my previous article, we can certainly be creative as individuals and try to invent new ways of doing things, but that will not be enough (Hence the Uprising in Art, joy and Uprising !). The solutions to the problems I am discussing here will inevitably require collective action. Yet the current system seems specifically designed to make solidarity difficult. Economic precarity, and all its consequences for our physical and psychological health, combined with the permanent competition fostered by the gig economy keep us isolated from one another. Once again, this is a subject that deserves its own article.

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It is sometimes difficult to grasp the scale of the transformation that society has undergone within the span of a few generations. Whenever my parents, who were born in the late 1950s, share memories of their childhood, I am struck by the sheer number and magnitude of the changes they have witnessed. They grew up on a farm, in a multigenerational household, in a deeply religious environment. They grew most of the food they consumed, and so on. From where we stand today, it is difficult to imagine what it was like to live back then.

When I talk with them, the story they tell is generally one of progress and prosperity. They now own a detached house in the suburbs and hold stable, moderately well-paid jobs in offices or factories. They enjoy all the comforts that come with it: two cars, a swimming pool, air conditioning, and so forth. They have leisure time and vacations, worlds away from the exhausting agricultural labour they experienced as teenagers.

Although they would never put it this way themselves, perhaps it is the nostalgic soul in me speaking, but whenever we dig into the past over a beer, I always detect a certain regret. Their eyes light up when they talk about the large gatherings “that just don’t happen anymore,” where people played music until the early hours of the morning, about their mothers’ legendary cooking, their aunt’s loom, or their uncle’s woodworking skills.

Today, at least in my family, very little remains of that heritage. Cooking has been reduced to the bare minimum, to what we call pratico-pratique in Québec (I loathe that expression!). Evenings end early. Nobody plays music anymore, nor engages in any kind of craft or artistic practice.

I do not want to romanticize a past that no longer exists. We cannot ignore the oppressive religious atmosphere of the time, the traditional roles imposed on women, not to mention the lack of rights for LGBTQ+ people. But when I walk through Costco and see people filling their carts with frozen meals, or when I visit someone who does not know how to cook, I cannot help but find it all rather sad.

My goal here is absolutely not to blame anyone for not knowing how to cook. In fact, it is quite the opposite. I want to shed light on the process of cultural, social, and human impoverishment that our societies have undergone since the 1960s, with the arrival of the bulldozer that is the consumer and entertainment economy. Even though I wrote very positively about Québec’s Révolution tranquille in a previous article, we must admit that one of its blind spots was how widely it opened the door to consumerism, American mass entertainment, and, above all, the commodification of everyday life.

It came at the expense of living practices. What we gained in efficiency and comfort, we lost in skills, creativity, forms of joy, and the intensity of human relationships. Above all, we have become dependent on it, condemned to purchase the products it sells us because we no longer know how to live otherwise.

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Of course, I am not saying that nobody knows how to cook anymore. But cooking, repairing, sewing, weaving, gardening, making music, and building things with one’s own hands are certainly not as widespread as they once were. Beyond making us dependent on products or professional expertise, this loss of skills deprives us of the immense satisfaction and pride that comes from making something ourselves.

To my mind, it is also accompanied by a loss of creativity and mental flexibility. Cooking, to stay with that example, encourages inventiveness. It forces us to adapt and improvise with whatever ingredients remain in the fridge, or to accommodate the preferences of our guests. As we master different techniques, we may find ourselves wanting to try new recipes, imagine new dishes, and experiment with new combinations.

Cooking also develops our sensitivity, our sense of smell, and our sense of taste, thereby transforming our relationship with food. The taste of a locally grown summer carrot has nothing in common with that of a supermarket carrot in winter. When we learn to recognize quality ingredients, when we understand the work that has gone into preparing a meal, we eat with greater pleasure and, above all, with gratitude.

It can also become a genuine source of joy, notably through the state of flow it sometimes induces, that wonderful state in which we lose track of time and become completely absorbed in the task at hand.

Spending hours in the kitchen also changes our relationship to time. It allows us to step outside the capitalist logic of efficiency and optimization. It invites us to take the time to do things well, to cook for ourselves because we deserve it, and to appreciate the process itself.

It also allows us to connect with others. Cooking for someone is an act of love, and a shared meal somehow always tastes better. Sitting down with loved ones after the effort invested in preparing a meal, hearing the appreciative exclamations around the table, is an addictive feeling.

The same could be said of music, craftsmanship, and countless other activities (I will come back to that another time!). This example of cooking illustrates one of the central ideas behind Art, Joy & Uprising: redefining what we mean by wealth. The more we delegate to the market what we could create, make, practice, or play ourselves, the poorer our lived experience becomes, both individually and collectively.

The market sells us the result, but removes the joys of the process, along with everything that the experience itself can bring into our lives. Wealth is not merely the accumulation of comforts or products gathering dust in our cupboards. It is the capacity to participate actively in life.

Little by little, without even realizing it, we have collectively delegated a vast number of human experiences to the market. I imagine a future in which we would not need to spend exorbitant amounts of money in order to keep ourselves occupied, to entertain ourselves, to connect with others, to experience music—to live, period.

So what do we do now?

We can begin today by making room in our lives for cooking, repairing, sewing, weaving, gardening, building, and more. I believe this is a simple yet effective way of going against the machine. May all those who can do so, do so!

Unfortunately, not everyone has that luxury. Pressure and financial insecurity mean that many people lack the physical space, mental space, skills, resources, or confidence needed to begin. Activities that were once ordinary, considered basic, have now become privileges. Consumer society now sells us, at great cost, what it first encouraged us to stop doing ourselves. Perhaps that is capitalism’s greatest trick: turning autonomy into an inaccessible luxury...we are not out of the woods yet!

Consequently, individual solutions will not be enough. We will have to stand together, organize, and rise up. Once again, I find myself opening another door—one that I will explore in future articles.

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One of the thinkers who has influenced me the most, and who is a major inspiration behind Art, Joy & Uprising, is Antonio Bispo dos Santos. I came across his work while browsing in a bookstore in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Sometimes, chance places people or works of art in our path that end up redirecting our trajectory. His book, A terra dá, a terra quer (The Earth Gives, the Earth Demands), has in some ways become a compass for me.

Antonio Bispo dos Santos is a philosopher, author, and activist from a quilombo, a type of community founded in Brazil from the late 1600s onward by enslaved people who had managed to escape from plantations. Whenever I find myself imagining an alternative to the future promoted by neoliberalism, it is with humility that I return to Bispo dos Santos’s words. For if there are people who know something about living outside the “machine,” organizing life beyond the market, and making decisions based on values other than those of capitalism, it is surely the members of these communities.

He writes that he “prefers not to speak of dreams, but of imaginaries, because dreams end when we wake up.” With this wonderful phrase, he reminds us that simply dreaming, wishing for happiness and peace in the world the way we mechanically do on New Year’s Day for example, means very little if we do not take the time to imagine what that might actually look like.

And that is the strength of the quote: dreams are vague and shapeless, and they quickly dissipate as soon as we begin to examine them. When we imagine, fully awake, the outlines of the project already begin to emerge. The more we reflect on them, often without realizing it, the brain shifts into problem-solving mode, into creative mode, and the project begins to take on a more tangible form.

Following Bispo dos Santos’s invitation and moving from dreams, as passive fantasies, to imagining different possibilities is the beginning of the process that may one day make this imagined future possible. Gradually, a series of questions presents itself. Will it be like this, or like that? Each answer makes the project more concrete and, in turn, generates new questions. The process has begun. When I compose, this is exactly how it unfolds. And of course, the same is true of every other art form, as well as creation and innovation in general.

Creating, performing, and listening to music, for example, can be seen as opening a kind of breach in space and time, where participants briefly bring an imagined, idealized society into existence. In his book Musicking, Christopher Small explains that the act of making music gives rise to a set of relationships that “model, or stand as a metaphor for, ideal relationships as the participants imagine them to be: relationships between person and person, between individual and society, between humanity and the natural world, and perhaps even the supernatural world.”

The musical act becomes a kind of laboratory in which these relationships can be tested. Whether we are aware of it or not, making music forces us to answer a remarkable number of questions, and our answers are highly revealing.

Who plays, and who listens? What hierarchies exist between participants? Are roles clearly defined, or are they fluid? Is individuality celebrated, or is a single vision being enforced? Who is this music for? Is everyone welcome?

What is the relationship to the body? Is dancing possible? Can people intervene? Is there room for improvisation, or must precise instructions be followed?

What is the relationship between music and space? How does time unfold within it? Does the music follow a narrative structure in which adversaries are defeated and obstacles overcome? Or does it instead follow the meandering path of a long, quiet river?

What is its relationship to nature? To the sacred? To the spiritual? I could go on like this for quite a while.

Imagining the future we wish for happens through the same process. What would a society look like in which everyone was happy and peace prevailed? To answer that question, we are forced to respond to an infinite number of others. This is precisely Christopher Small’s point: take the questions generated by the musical act above and ask those same questions about the society you are imagining. You will find them surprisingly relevant, and they immediately set in motion the process I described earlier.

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This same process of ideation, whether in artistic practice, personal life, or within groups and social movements, necessarily pushes us beyond familiar paths. It is often a joyful, exhilarating, and electrifying experience, one that we usually long to repeat. As Jenny Odell writes in Saving Time:

“Activists or not, many people know the feeling of going ‘off script’ in any number of ways, where you feel you are truly making something new with others. Even if in seemingly small ways and only briefly, you may find that you are bringing into existence a new territory of ideas, language and actions that could never have been predicted, even by you.”

What strikes me about this passage is the idea of a new territory of ideas, language, and actions emerging into existence. It directly echoes Small’s definition of the musical act as a breach that temporarily reveals imagined relationships.

I therefore wish for all of us to make more room for creativity, artistic practice, and art in our individual lives, in our communities, and in our societies. I use creativity here in the broadest possible sense. And I wish for us to move from dreaming to imagining together, in contact with others, and in many different contexts—professional, community-based, and political alike.

Art gives shape to possibilities before they exist materially. It encourages us to act, because before we can build another world, we must first have some sense of what it might look like.
It is one of the ways out of the crisis of imagination we are currently living through—or rather, the crisis of imaginaries, to borrow Bispo dos Santos’s words. It is a rich subject to which I will return often in future articles.

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I was having dinner with friends when the conversation suddenly took a turn that pulled me out of the pleasant state of relaxation I had been in. As it happens in groups made up of people in their thirties and forties, we had unfortunately started talking about money.

A friend was telling us that the annual increase in her rent this year was completely insane. She complained that she had very little recourse against her landlord to refuse the increase, and that this situation was causing her significant financial stress.

She then started telling us that there was a possibility she might soon get a promotion at work, and that if it happened, she would dedicate all her efforts toward saving enough money to buy a multiplex. It would finally, she said, generate passive income that would help finance her lifestyle.

That’s when I almost choked on my food. Because while she quite rightly saw herself as the victim of a system that — through relentless rent increases — condemns her to economic precarity, she did not seem aware that her dream was to ultimately benefit from that very same system.

Instead of revolting against capitalism for having transformed a basic human need — housing — into a source of profit, the only possible solution she could imagine was to further feed that same system. That is to say: by working more, by investing all her savings into property, by going into debt, so that one day, she too, could profit from her own tenants.

This group of friends — educated and politically progressive — either chose to ignore the contradiction so as not to ruin the mood, or simply did not perceive it at all. In any case, nobody discussed the real root of the problem: the inalienable right to generate profit. Not even me, honestly, because I felt out of sync with the group as the conversation quickly shifted toward buying and selling property...

While from my perspective my friend’s reasoning appeared as a glaring contradiction, most people would perceive it very differently. For someone who considers profit a legitimate right, who sees property ownership as a marker of success, and who believes the only way to improve one’s condition is to fully submit oneself to the capitalist game through relentless work, my friend’s logic makes perfect sense.

Buying property is perceived — for her, and for many others — as a “natural” step for someone who is “moving forward” in life. How many times have I heard that...

My friend probably never really took the time to observe her own desires, to ask herself where they come from, or what values they are rooted in. Had she done so, she might have realized that she wants to become the beneficiary of the very same system that makes her suffer, thereby perpetuating it in turn. She might also realize that her desires are, in some way, working against her own happiness.

And to me, that is the heart of the problem: collectively and individually, we are not used to questioning our desires, what they reveal about us and our values, nor our definition of success. For most of us, work as a source of identity and self-worth is accepted as self-evident, just like the rules of the capitalist game imposed upon us.

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It would be far too easy to paint tenants as the good guys and landlords as the villains. Reality is more complex than that; there are countless variables and situations. Capitalism is not embodied solely by billionaire oppressors sitting at the top of skyscrapers — we all embody it to varying degrees, through our desires, our political opinions, and our actions.

Most of the time, however, we are not fully conscious of it. We operate through reflexes, through conditioning. We are all, at times, somewhat on “autopilot.” We think exactly the way capitalism expects us to think, thereby contributing to reproducing the system itself.

I really like the expression “false desires,” found in the writings of Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, because it explains very clearly how capitalism perpetuates itself — and many other things as well. Through education, conversations with those around us, advertising, and socially constructed norms of success, these false desires impose themselves upon us as real. We make both major and minor life decisions in order to satisfy them, to reach that standard of success, thereby reproducing through our own actions the very situations that make us suffer and complain.

What would happen if we started questioning our values and our definition of success, instead of accepting as self-evident those imposed upon us by capitalism? We could throw sand into the gears by becoming aware of our contradictions and adjusting our decisions accordingly. We could step outside the frameworks that are limiting us without us even realizing it, and make conscious life choices that might actually make us happy.

Do we really want to climb the corporate ladder? Do all these working hours and responsibilities truly make us fulfilled human beings? Do we really want to go deeply into debt to buy a huge suburban house far away from everything? Will that new car really offer us the freedom promised by all the ads interrupting our Netflix shows, or will it chain us to endless monthly payments?

I believe we should not wait for the revolution to begin creating the future we long for. Right now, we can already start questioning the legitimacy of our desires and aspirations, trying to understand the values at the root of our opinions, and changing our lives accordingly.

Far be it from me to place the burden of capitalism entirely on individual shoulders. Of course we are trapped inside a massive “machine” that is far bigger than any of us, and obviously large-scale change will necessarily happen collectively and politically.

But what we think individually still matters. It impacts our decisions, which directly impact society, and also influence the people around us. And if we truly want the emergence of a collective political movement, then a majority of us will need to learn how to perceive the world from outside the “machine.”

Right now, it is politically profitable for politicians to campaign on profitability for landlords, because becoming a landlord is the life goal of a great many people.

I would like to propose that we imagine a future where profitable real estate investments are no longer synonymous with success. A future where, much like the negative reaction people today have toward smoking indoors, we would feel comfortable pointing out the contradictions in our friends’ conversations when they talk about money over dinner. Let us imagine a future where the great desire of most people would instead be to live in comfortable and affordable housing, leaving them with enough money and time for culture, sports, friends, loved ones, and meaningful experiences.

What would such a future look like? I imagine far more affordable and decent housing, more housing cooperatives inhabited by vibrant communities, more welcoming urban spaces and public green areas open to everyone. I imagine fewer outrageously expensive condos with exclusive amenities reserved for the wealthy, and fewer anonymous and depressing suburbs.

And you — what do you think such a future could look like?

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Lately, in order to survive the heaviness of our era and its endless stream of bad news, I have consciously decided to read books that would help keep alive the small flame of hope I still have. One of those books is Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit. Although it was written nearly twenty years ago, it feels more relevant than ever. I highly recommend it!

She describes hope as the recognition that we don’t really know what is going to happen, and that “within the spaciousness of uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes.” Hope, she says, is “an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable,” an alternative both to the certainty of naïve optimism, which believes everything will somehow work itself out, and to cynical determinism, which believes that since everything is already predetermined, there is no point in trying to change anything.

Her way of describing hope affected me deeply because it reminded me of something one of my university professors, James C. Lebens, once told me backstage between two concerts. We were discussing the exhaustion that came from the ambitious musical projects we had undertaken, and he said: “If we, as artists, waited to know exactly what our artistic projects would demand from us, we would never do anything.”

Without realizing it, or perhaps that was precisely his intention, he had just given me one of the most important lessons of my personal, artistic, and professional life.

Because every time I begin a new project, every time I stagger before the vertigo caused by the immense uncertainty unfolding before me, I remember the wise words of my former professor. Creation, by definition, means moving toward the unknown, the new, the unexplored, toward building what has never existed before, what has never been seen, heard, or experienced. If we allow ourselves to be immobilized by uncertainty, we will never act.

At the beginning of a project, when there are so many variables, so many decisions to make, so much material to choose from and discover, my nervous system naturally finds this tension very difficult to tolerate. By default, it seeks comfort, and I must gather all my strength to calm it down and continue working anyway. In a way, this is one of the key “skills” involved in creating: learning not only to live with uncertainty, but to move forward despite it.

Unfortunately, I often hear dismissive comments about artists — that they are not “realistic” — and I myself have often been criticized for being too “idealistic.” Yet when faced with the current state of the world, with so many challenges ahead of us (climate change, economic inequality, democracy in crisis, social fragmentation), can we really afford to abandon hope? Isn’t this very ability to move despite uncertainty precisely what we need in order to break through our current paralysis?

Besides, what does it even mean to be realistic? If it means waiting for an instruction manual or a recipe before taking action, then we are automatically condemning ourselves to the status quo. Every new crisis is, by definition, new, and therefore requires new solutions. There is no preexisting roadmap. It is only by remaining creative and developing the ability to move forward despite uncertainty that we will be able to overcome these crises.

Sometimes I wonder whether these cynical comments are, deep down, excuses to remain within one’s comfort zone — a way of absolving ourselves while watching the world burn from the sidelines, an unspoken admission that we are afraid of change.

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And yet, here in Québec, where I live, we should have confidence in our collective ability to move forward, to break from the status quo, and to take risks. We have already done it before. When the builders of the Révolution tranquille, the Quiet Revolution, nationalized electricity, removed religion from schools and hospitals, and created a public and accessible network of secondary schools, colleges, universities, and hospitals — all within the span of ten years — they acted with the conviction that this was the right thing to do.

It was obviously an immense social, political, and economic undertaking, and despite all the preparation in the world, it is impossible that they could have predicted every detail in advance or calculated the exact “returns” on their investment. They moved forward with the dream of a prosperous, educated, and more just society. Their audacity paid off. Today, 71% of Québécois have at least a high school diploma, compared to only 29% in the 1960s. Québec now ranks just below the Nordic countries in terms of social equality and prosperity.

So how do we cultivate hope collectively? How do we relearn our relationship to risk, how do we become more comfortable with uncertainty again? These are the questions that inhabit me every morning when I sit down at my desk to compose. Because my artistic practice has, in many ways, forced me to develop this capacity, I cannot help but feel a certain responsibility toward my community. Artists — and myself included — have, I increasingly believe, both the ability and perhaps even the responsibility to transmit this to others.

The mere fact that we devote ourselves to our work every day and that our works exist at all is already, in itself, a victory and a source of inspiration, proof that something else is possible. Our works also carry values, move people, provoke thought. Of course that can be immensely powerful, and I will return to this in future texts.

But is there a way to go even further? Both in gaining the freedom to create even more daring and impactful works, and in diversifying the roles artists occupy within society? I believe artists should take up more space in public life, in media, in politics, in education, and within institutions of all kinds.

This is obviously not easy, since the economic precarity most artists face already pushes us to the edge of exhaustion, while society often prefers us quiet and isolated in our respective studios. In fact, capitalism and patriarchy do everything they can to keep us in that condition (I will return to this in greater detail as well). It therefore makes little sense to wait for institutional or commercial permissions before mobilizing ourselves and stepping outside the roles we have been assigned.

How might we use our expertise to help restore hope to the people around us? I’m brainstorming here, but why not attempt to go beyond merely pointing out crises by proposing alternatives to the present? Why not help people fall back in love with what already exists, with what is worth fighting for? Why not celebrate the small and large victories that make the future feel a little less dark? Why not help people imagine the future we long for ?

What tools do we already have that would allow us to connect with more people without waiting for institutional support? What already existing spaces could we enter in order to speak, share, and mobilize?

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