Domination at the Heart of Culture

The praise we bestow upon “great artists” reveals, beneath its flattering appearances, a structure of domination. Behind admiration lies the legitimization of a power that operates against cultural democracy.

The Vocabulary of Admiration as the Language of Power

Admirable people, geniuses, artists, untouchable people, important people, indispensable people. What do we really mean by these qualifiers? When we describe certain individuals as essential references, whom we supposedly need, we are actually designating them by another term: they are dominators. All these positive terms—“admirable,” “untouchable,” “indispensable”—actually mean one and the same thing: they designate people who exercise power.

Why this equivalence? Because these qualifiers establish a hierarchy. They place certain people in an untouchable position relative to others, considering them more important than ordinary mortals. Pierre Bourdieu demonstrated this in Distinction (1979): cultural taste is never neutral; it is always an instrument of social classification that distinguishes the “legitimate” from the “illegitimate.” This mechanism is precisely what we call domination: there are dominators whose domination is legitimized through laudatory discourse.

I am not claiming that there are no people who have things to offer one another, nor that some are not experts in their field and cannot share their expertise. Of course, and fortunately, humans can enrich each other. But precisely, it is about enriching one another, without entering into a system of domination. Therein lies all the difference between horizontal sharing and vertical imposition.

The Media Factory of Cultural Hierarchy

These “magnificent” people, held up on pedestals forever, sometimes end up being revealed as dominators with despicable behaviors. But this revelation was already contained in the dithyrambic terms that described them. These terms already spoke of domination, they announced it, they prepared it.

This is why, from my childhood, I felt something strange and violent when reading Télérama. I cite Télérama because it was the magazine present in my home, but you could read the same thing in Libération, and today in Les Inrockuptibles. It is hardly surprising that Les Inrockuptibles is a magazine steeped in the most ordinary sexism, which has always defended Bertrand Cantat, for example. These media participate in the fabrication of cultural hierarchy: they position themselves as judges and, moreover, as opinion makers.

These institutions are at the heart of manufacturing a system of domination that runs counter to a democratic cultural policy. They produce exactly the opposite: a dominating cultural policy where everyone’s functions are defined rigidly, immutably, decided by some for others. Symbolically, this is why certain popular filmmakers are systematically discredited, why certain popular television presenters are denigrated on principle, even though they are no “worse” than others. It has nothing to do with money: it is cultural domination through the symbolic.

A Caste That Feeds on Submission

This domination is terribly violent. It is a caste that recognizes itself, that reconstitutes itself over time, that sets its own rules. It has its own needs and feeds on this domination, because for domination to have meaning, it needs people to dominate—people whose blood it will, metaphorically, suck.

First, there are the dazzled spectators who come and pay for their seats. They are by no means respected, but feel valorized for having had the chance, for having obtained a ticket to the most dominant show of all. This valorization is precisely what makes domination so terrible: it is extremely seductive. This is what I call “dark seduction.” It dangles its lure before us, as if we were going to gain something by touching these elites. But no: the elites feed on our submission.

“Legitimate culture is not merely what the dominant practice: it is what, by the very fact of being practiced by the dominant, becomes an instrument of domination.”

Pierre Bourdieu (Distinction, 1979)

The Examples of the Théâtre du Soleil and the Philharmonie

We see revelations of sexual violence at the Théâtre du Soleil emerging. I am sorry, but it is a retrospective obviousness: we were already at the heart of domination in this institution. A left-wing domination, a right-thinking domination, but a Télérama-style domination, a reassuring domination. Everyone goes to be reassured where it reassures them.

There is theater for right-wing people, and theater for left-wing people. But in reality, it is the same thing. Both groups, those who go to the theater, right and left alike, are bourgeois. Simply, among the bourgeois, some vote right and others vote left. Some take pleasure in telling themselves they are doing good for humanity by donating to migrants on the other side of the world; others tell themselves they are doing good for humanity by funding their traditionalist Catholic parish. But deep down, they resemble each other, even though each believes they are essentially different from the other. And whether left or right, they would not let someone who does not share their cultural code enter the hall.

If someone revolted during a performance, those on the left as well as those on the right would rise to immediately exclude them from the agora. As happened recently at the Philharmonie, where non-violent activists dared to interrupt a concert by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra for a few moments. These activists were immediately struck by spectators, struck with unbelievable violence, in an immediate reflex.

Were the people who struck them left-wing or right-wing? Both, in my opinion. They were all lovers of the culture of domination, intolerant of democracy, that is to say, of expression. Is disrupting a concert such a serious crime that it can immediately provoke such violence from the spectators themselves? Who are these spectators of culture, supposedly open-minded and wanting to defend culture as a space of openness and emancipation for democracy?

These gestures are all the more significant in that they were immediately spontaneous: they were not premeditated, and therefore express a deep truth in the people who perpetrated them. I do not want to essentialize: I am not at all saying that all spectators were supportive of this violence; I am even convinced of the contrary. But the cultural institution, the Philharmonie, through the voice of its director, was absolutely not clear. It put on the same level the supposed violence of non-violent activists and the real violence of those who immediately struck them, even though there was no initial physical violence nor any danger presented by these people. The only people taken into police custody were the pacifist activists, and not, at least initially, the perpetrators of violence.

The Health Pass or the Complicity of Cultural Institutions

The institution passes over these acts of violence in silence, in the same way that at the Théâtre du Soleil as in many other places, during the Covid period, the health pass was applied without any explanation, without any political contextualization of the surveillance implications it carried. It was a legal obligation, certainly, but any legal obligation, if one judges it unconstitutional, can be—and one can take the risk—not respected if one has one’s own political viewpoint.

Yet here, it was not even discussed. Spectators were stigmatized at the entrance between good and bad citizens, between those who “beeped” in the generalized surveillance and those who did not beep. I do not want to question here, because it is another subject, the legitimacy or not of this supposedly health policy, but above all security policy. France was one of the best students in the world in the authoritarian manner of implementing what had strictly no demonstrated health effect, and this was attested from the first feedback on this type of approach.

But France persisted in a security policy without scientific justification, much more brutal toward citizens than that of neighboring countries. Why did these famous “open-minded” artists, who supposedly work for democracy, not ask themselves any questions? Not about the epidemic, which was real—there was a real epidemic, action was needed—but about the way this epidemic was managed by the State, which consisted of political choices.

Why no questions? Because one is part of the dominators, and ultimately this attitude, which had shocked me at the time, was in reality completely coherent. I found it incoherent, and I even wrote about it. But I am quite pained to now have to accept that it was perfectly coherent with the domination that is the operating mode, unfortunately, so unfortunately, of this sector.

A Sector of Power That Has Failed Its Democratic Mission

This sector should be a sector much more civic than corporatist; it is in fact a sector of power. A sector that, in its history, was the instrument of power, that wants to remain so, but that in reality today no longer is. I am going to say something that may shock: so much the better that this sector no longer has power, is no longer on the side of power. Because it made very poor use of it.

Some are aware of this, even though they were the main actors of this poor use. Like the director of the Maison de la Culture d’Amiens who, in 2015, facing the results of the far right in their region, said around them: “We have failed,” meaning “we have not succeeded.”

I disagree. You succeeded perfectly. You thought that by cultivating your domination, you were defending democracy, which was your politically “marketable” pretext of the time. When in reality, the only thing you were doing was establishing domination. The dominators are not always the same, which is absolutely normal. You succeeded in establishing a structure of domination instead of working to build emancipation. Emancipation was your pretext, your lie to justify your domination.

You claimed, facing the “uncultured” crowds and masses, that you were going to emancipate them with your good taste, your expertise, while despising them, while considering that their taste had no value and that they were uncultured, and that you knew better. This is precisely domination. Jean-Michel Lucas, theorist of cultural rights, named this posture “cultural arrogance”: the conviction that some know what is good for others (Culture and Human Development, 2017).

Democratization Against Cultural Democracy

Faced with this domination, what happens? There are those who submit. But those who submit will always follow the dominators, whoever they may be, whether they are left-wing or right-wing, it matters not. They will submit because they do not have critical courage. Everyone does what they can.

Whereas if you had, on the contrary, given more space to citizens, if you had worked toward a true cultural fabric that was truly emancipatory—that is to say, taking into account the fact that citizens too could transform you, and that perhaps you could have worked on less condescending cultural programming—you would have founded a real democratic soil.

You have therefore not failed: you have perfectly accomplished your mission, which is that culture should serve power, whatever that power may be. Power changes hands, the ground is perfect for this new power.

Toward a Policy of Cultural Emancipation

Obviously, I am not saying “well done.” But it would still be interesting if we could finally stop the hypocrisy, and if culture funded by public money could envision itself not in a political sense of power and domination, but in a democratic, republican, and emancipatory sense.

It is time, and this should not be just discourse, but action. We have cultural rights that allow us to do this. The NOTRe law of 2015 and the LCAP law of 2016 inscribed these rights in French law: “Responsibility in cultural matters is exercised jointly by local authorities and the State in respect of the cultural rights set forth in the UNESCO Convention.” This would have many positive consequences if this orientation were truly implemented.

It is a matter of moving from a logic of democratization—top-down, normative, carrying an implicit judgment about what people should like—to a logic of cultural democracy: horizontal, participatory, recognizing the legitimacy of everyone to contribute to cultural life. This transformation requires abandoning the posture of the “expert” to adopt that of mediator, of the one who facilitates exchanges rather than directing them.

It is on this condition that the cultural sector can finally keep the promise it has kept far too little: to be a space of emancipation rather than an instrument of domination.