The Dramatization of Mistrust

An evening at the theater in a left-leaning city reveals a troubling paradox: the welcoming procedures produce exactly the opposite of the democratic promise. A testimony and analysis.

Theater begins before the stage

A National Dramatic Center (CDN) in a working-class, left-wing town in the Paris suburbs. A place that claims to be open to the city and its residents. Let us remember that CDNs are funded jointly by the State (around 57%) and local authorities—municipalities (27%), regions (9%), and departments (7%). It is therefore the money of all citizens that sustains these institutions. Yet, in the theater that night, there were only bourgeois patrons. This observation, commonplace for those who frequent these spaces, deserves a pause: theater, funded by everyone’s taxes, clearly does not address everyone.

But even before entering the hall, even before seeing the show, another staging unfolds: that of our status as suspects.

At the entrance, they check our bags. They peer inside, just as when one takes a flight or goes to a police station. But at the supermarket next door, at the restaurant, at the neighborhood bookstore, or the library, no one searches our belongings. Why this difference? What justifies certain places—specifically subsidized cultural venues—arrogating the right to violate our privacy when others, sometimes more crowded, do not? The answer is not about security; we will see that it cannot be. It is symbolic: it is a choice of representation, a choice about how the institution views those it welcomes.

From the outset, within this reception protocol, something is at play that belongs entirely to theater in the sociological sense. Erving Goffman masterfully analyzed this: our daily life is a permanent performance. Theater is not just on the stage. It begins as soon as the threshold is crossed, in the spatial arrangement, in the ritualized gestures of those who greet us.

What strikes one first is the silence surrounding this gesture. The search is carried out without a word, without explanation, as if it were self-evident. Therein lies its primary violence: the absence of speech. For when there are no more words, when speech is absent or forbidden, language does not disappear; it shifts toward the body, toward the gesture, toward physical constraint. And that language is the language of violence. Violence arises precisely when someone no longer has, or no longer wants, the capacity to speak, to debate, to explain themselves to the other. It is a language imposed on the body without symbolic mediation, without the possibility of response or contestation.

What strikes one next is the superficial nature of this control. A quick glance, a bag slightly opened. It is a sham. Someone truly intending to do harm would not be stopped by this cosmetic inspection. So why maintain it when everyone knows it is a simulacre? Because it institutes a silent narrative: that of our potential dangerousness. We are suspects as we enter this place. And we are told this, without words, through gesture alone, which makes it all the more violent.

One might object that it is a “legal obligation,” that it is done even if it isn’t liked. Then why are there many cultural venues where bags are not searched? Public libraries, for example, welcome their users without suspecting them. It is not a legal obligation; it is a choice. A few days before this evening, I had visited another cultural site, much larger, capable of holding far more spectators, and thus potentially far more “dangerous” according to this security logic. One entered freely, without control. Trust was the rule. Our position as citizens inside was not the same, and it was clearly visible: the audience was diverse.

The fortress in the heart of the city

Once this first threshold is crossed, the venue presents itself, through its architecture and furniture, as a warm space. Comfortable armchairs, soft lighting, careful decoration. This warmth contrasts with the barrier at the entrance. And this paradox reveals something profound about the very conception of the place.

What is taking shape here is what I might call the fortress logic. To be a safe place, a place in which one has confidence, this theater must precisely be closed off from the outside, from the city of which it is nonetheless a part. Through prohibition, symbolic barriers, and searches, walls must be erected in the very heart of the city. Inside, we know we are safe, protected from the outside. But this “outside” is the very city this venue is supposed to serve!

Symbolically, this means the city is considered a dangerous place, a place and a population from which one must be protected. It implies that closed spaces must be built there which, in turn, will not be dangerous. Without intending to, without even being aware of it, this setup conveys a representation of the “other” as intrinsically threatening. They can under no circumstances be allowed to enter freely. This city would thus be a place of danger where the bourgeoisie comes to gather in a controlled, secured space, where they can finally breathe and be out of harm’s way.

There is even a small bookstore with ultra-specialized works, clearly forbidden to mere mortals by their hermeticism. I am not saying they shouldn’t be there, but a diversity of audiences would also call for a diversity of literary offerings—books for children, for example, and not just books almost exclusively centered on artists.

The rhetoric of stupefaction

Then comes the entrance into the auditorium, and with it a new ritual, but this time, words are present. And what words.

A few moments before the show, a young woman takes the floor. With a smile—always a smile—she recites a litany of prohibitions. But what struck me, and what I had never heard formulated quite this way, was the vocabulary used. An astonishingly aggressive, even threatening vocabulary that contrasted disturbingly with the friendliness of the smile. One felt a rhetorical mastery whose objective seemed to be to mesmerize the audience, to produce an effect of “sidération” (stupefaction) that would guarantee obedience. We are not allowed to bring food. We are not allowed to leave during the performance. We are not allowed to use our phones, to take photos, to film. The consequences of our disobedience were not named, but the threat was there, very strong, in the lexicon employed.

This discourse is paradoxical in several respects. First, the gap between the apparent sweetness and the harshness of the message—this smile accompanying threatening words—produces a sense of shock, a form of paralysis that disarms any impulse to protest. Second, its disconnection from reality: if someone had brought food, what should they do at that moment? Walk back out with their sandwich just as the show is starting? Perhaps one can see traces of past experiences where shows were disrupted. But faced with such disruptions, would it not have been more fruitful to question the show itself, or the reception protocol, rather than strengthening the rhetorical arsenal of threat?

Another staff member, a tall and imposing man, like those found at the entrance of nightclubs—a “bouncer,” as they say—manages the flow of the group. With a smiling firmness once again, he presses the spectators toward their seats. It is not individuals he is accompanying, but a group, a herd he is pushing on time into the space. No ill intention on his part as a person, undoubtedly. But a complete lack of awareness of the symbolic violence this conveys.

Michel Schneider, in The Comedy of Culture (1993), perceived these contradictions of the subsidized cultural world with biting acuity. He wrote:

“Culture has become an administration like any other, with its officials, its hierarchies, its rites, and its territories. It produces fewer works than discourses on works, less creation than legitimation.”

This observation remains disturbingly relevant. For what is at stake at the theater entrance is precisely that: not the welcoming of human beings who have come to live an aesthetic experience, but the administration of suspect bodies that must be channeled through stupefaction.

A supply-centered programming

Reading the season’s introductory text in the theater program is also enlightening. The discourse is entirely focused on the content of the artistic proposals: the plays, the themes, the guest artists. It is a pure logic of supply. Art is conceived as a work to be contemplated, from which one must be taught, not as an experience to be lived, even less as a co-construction with the residents, or at least programming choices that might relate to the concerns of those living nearby.

John Dewey, in Art as Experience (1934), nevertheless proposed a completely different vision. For him, art in a democratic society should “liberate anyone from the intimidating myths that hinder aesthetic experience”. He insisted on the necessary continuity between art and daily life:

“The work of art develops and accentuates what is specifically valuable in the things that provide us with daily pleasure. Arising from the everyday, art’s function is therefore to improve it.”

Nothing of the sort here. The openness to the city’s citizens—lest we forget the municipality is one of the funders—is never truly named. The link to the residents is absent from the discourse.

Even more troubling is this passage from the director’s interview:

“It is false to claim that these houses are elitist and withdrawn into themselves. The figures prove it: one could not be in an ’entre-soi’ (exclusive circle) with theaters this full.”

During the performance I saw, the hall was half-full, with the bourgeoisie. One can have full halls and still have an exclusive circle. The discourse is purely quantitative, without any openness to the question of audience diversity. If there are people, does that suffice to prove there is no exclusion? But who are these people? If they are students brought in herds who are stigmatized at the entrance, judged, and controlled so as not to disturb—and I am almost certain, having often observed school matinees, that the discourse addressed to them is even more violent than what I experienced as an ordinary spectator.

The republican argument and its unthought assumptions

The director concludes the interview by mentioning her own trajectory:

“For my part, I encountered art at school, thanks to a cinema section offered in my ZEP (Priority Education Zone) middle school: it opened me up to the world. I realize how lucky I was: the National Education system allowed me this discovery that changed me for life.”

This type of argument is the most worn-out republican trope: school as a place of inclusion, social promotion, and emancipation through culture.

But this argument, however sincere, is in my view politically grave. For the French school system is primarily a place of social exclusion; PISA reports demonstrate this every four years with staggering consistency. There are, of course, exceptions that prove the rule, and the director herself is the product of such an exception. But this vision guilt-trips those who did not take the same path. It implies that if others did not succeed, it is because they did not know how to seize their chance, or did not make the necessary effort. How is it an opening to the “other” to hold such a discourse? It is the most crushing and stigmatizing meritocratic discourse there is, under the guise of a good conscience.

Marjorie Glas, in When Art Chases the Popular (2023), precisely analyzes this phenomenon of symbolic eviction:

“Founded on the belief in the social utility of theater, its political function, and its openness to all audiences, public theater has gradually refocused on itself and its internal stakes. The heroization of the artist has gone hand in hand with the marginalization of the layperson. Leading to the erasure of the popular public, and even the public altogether, in professional and aesthetic stakes.”

This refocusing manifests itself even in the discourses of legitimation: one speaks of oneself, of one’s own exemplary trajectory, rather than the actual conditions of welcome for those who do not resemble us.

When a culture professional dares not enter

A few days before this evening, I had dinner with a colleague I hadn’t seen for several years. She has lived in this city for over twenty years; she is an Officer of Arts and Letters, at the end of her career—in other words, she is fully legitimate in the world of culture. She spoke to me about this theater spontaneously, without knowing I planned to go there a few days later. She told me she didn’t dare enter. She wanted to, but found it “super difficult” to find the program. She was intimidated. She had a knot in her stomach. She was afraid of being judged, of not being intelligent or cultured enough to have “the right” to enter.

She also told me that at the market, where she always goes, information about what is happening in this theater never circulates. In short, she has never gone in twenty years, even though she lives two steps away and wants to, even though she has no difficulty going to the cinema in the same city.

This testimony is sadly significant. Here is someone with all the cultural resources and institutional legitimacy possible, yet who still feels this exclusion, this fear of being judged. What then do those who lack these resources feel? This exclusion is not a misunderstanding or a lack of comprehension on the part of the residents. It is the direct product of the mechanisms I have described—their most logical, predictable, damaging, and hypocritical effect.

The normalization of fear

What seems most serious to me in all this—and I insist on it because it is truly the heart of the problem—is that we find this situation normal. It even seemed normal to me. I was not overly surprised when asked to open my bag. This is the sign of deep internalization: we have accepted being considered, by default, as potentially terrorist, potentially violent individuals. And we consider it normal that this should be the bedrock of human relations—to mutually suspect each other of the worst intentions.

If we find this normal, it is because we have been colonized by fear. It has settled within us; it inhabits our bodies and imaginaries to the point that we no longer see it. It is an internal colonization that runs exactly counter to what democracy should produce. For democracy presupposes trust in the other, the wager of a shared humanity. Fear produces withdrawal, suspicion, and mistrust—fertile ground for all authoritarianisms, the breeding ground for violence.

People who wish to kill others (a grave moral disorder) are a tiny minority. But through this staging mechanism, we presuppose that the majority shares this symptom. We create a violent world. These cultural venues, which present themselves as spaces of tolerance, critical thinking, and democratic construction, produce—through their dramatization of reception—the exact opposite situation. They lead us into an imaginary of muted violence.

For what feeds extremism and violence? It is the fear of the other. Rather than saying “let us love one another, let us consider our mutual qualities, let us overcome fear”, these places, which hold this discourse in their programs and charters, contradict it the moment one crosses their threshold—and even before, through the intimidating image they project. The contradiction is gaping, yet invisible because it has been naturalized.

McDonald’s: more welcoming than the theater

A conclusion is inescapable, however paradoxical it may seem: in a McDonald’s, one is more respected and less stigmatized than in a National Dramatic Center. It is so paradoxical. In one of the high temples of triumphant capitalism, one is not considered a potentially dangerous individual. You enter, you leave, freely. And yet, a large McDonald’s welcomes far more people than a theater; thus, according to the logic of fear, it should control entries even more strictly.

But they do not. And have there been attacks in McDonald’s? The only notable “attack” against this chain was in the 1990s, when José Bové and his companions dismantled a restaurant under construction to protest against junk food. There was no one in the establishment, and it was an ecological protest.

This paradox is sad and terrible. In the small restaurant across from the theater, in the neighborhood library, one enters and leaves as one pleases. In the place of culture where one is supposed to be emancipated, one is, by principle and by default, treated as a potentially dangerous being who must be controlled, whose privacy must be violated so that something “cultural” can happen.

The dramatization of mistrust: naming to transform

I propose to name this phenomenon the dramatization of mistrust. It is the process by which the reception protocols of cultural venues stage a systematic suspicion toward the people they claim to serve. This dramatization is not an organizational detail. It constitutes the first act of the play, the one that conditions all the others. It says something fundamental about the relationship the institution intends to build with its public.

Pierre Bourdieu showed, in Distinction (1979), how legitimate cultural practices reproduce patterns of symbolic domination that exclude as much as they include. The dramatization of mistrust is one of the most visible, yet least seen, manifestations of this domination. It operates within the very bodies of the spectators, before they have seen anything at all, by assigning them a place: that of the suspect to be watched.

One might object that these controls are a necessity in the face of the terrorist threat. But in that case, one must be consistent: search people’s bodies, search thoroughly, because this specific search is fake—it is only a sham. One might say: the simple presence of a check discourages potential attackers. Not at all; someone who intends to attack and has equipped themselves to do so is far more intelligent and will ensure they commit their aggression, search or no search.

The search, therefore, changes absolutely nothing regarding actual security. It is merely the territorialization of fear, intolerance, and stigmatization. And the smile of each person performing it—for they are doing their best in the situation assigned to them, and likely do not consciously support what they are participating in—does not change the fact that they are actors in this theater that I permit myself to call ignoble, in light of the beautiful discourses on democracy that these same venues proclaim.

The systemic dimension: beyond individual responsibilities

It would be unfair to psychologize these behaviors, to reduce them to the responsibility of each individual. The person searching bags is doing their best within the framework assigned to them—it is, in fact, why they only pretend to search, because they likely think no less of it themselves. The person delivering the threatening speech is probably following a directive from management or the governing bodies. We are in a system, and the actions of individuals depend on the system in which they evolve.

A system based on trust does not produce the same actions as a system based on mistrust. This self-evident truth deserves meditation. A system where trust is established as the rule, where it is assumed a priori that those who come are allies of the place, partners in the coming experience, does not generate the same behaviors as a system where mistrust is the norm. The former produces openness, creativity, and encounter. The latter fatally, logically, produces more violence and aggression, for it structures them in the imagination, calls for them, anticipates them, waits for them, and ends up provoking them.

Why? Because a system based on trust is not naive for that matter. It remains lucid. But when problems arise, they are managed collectively and democratically by the people present, spectators included, and not in an oppressive and policing manner. The underlying imaginary is that of a solidary community, not that of security control. And this imaginary shapes the behavior of everyone.

Speech as an alternative to violence

Democracy is not consensus. It is a choice of openness to the other, to controversy. It is a choice to fight against fear, and to debate our disagreements through words. It is a choice to listen to alterity. It is the conviction that it is in listening and opening up to different identities that a better world resides. A better world is not in the heads of those who are convinced they know what is good for others—that is a dictatorship.

And democracy requires speech. It is even its primary condition. Putting words to things, being able to debate them, welcoming disagreement—this is what allows us to overcome violence. For everything is language. But when words are missing or forbidden, when languages without words are used—gestures imposed on bodies, silent mechanisms that constrain without explaining—these are very often languages of violence. The silent search is such a language. It says nothing, but it imposes itself on the body of the other. It leaves no room for response, questioning, or contestation.

Implementing democracy means taking the risk of doing so at every moment. To affirm that one is not afraid is to affirm a desire to trust one another, to share this culture, to help those who struggle with it, to put them at ease, to tell them they will not be judged, and that they will not be seen as potential enemies. That is how democracy is built: through speech, through trust, and through the refusal of silent violence.

It is not naivety to say this. It is a political commitment. And the political is found in every daily gesture. That is where the political truly lies, not in beautiful speeches. Beautiful speeches have a function: to establish a social role for those who deliver them. What changes the world are acts. What matters are concrete gestures, including that of the hand that opens a bag at a theater entrance, or that of the voice which, instead of threatening, would welcome.

After the 2015 attacks, the challenge was precisely to say: no, we will not give in to fear. That was the struggle. But with time, and then with the Covid period, the majority gave in. We accepted being governed by fear. We normalized control mechanisms. We internalized suspicion as a mode of social relation. Fear has colonized us from within.

A bourgeois hypocrisy

Things must be called what they are. What I observed that evening was a bourgeois hypocrisy. Beautiful speeches about tolerance, diversity, and openness to all, and acts that produce exactly the opposite. A condescension exercised with a smile, accepted as something normal. If, in venues funded by public money, we do not cultivate openness to the other and trust—not inside a fortress, but in a true opening to the city—we have not understood the role of theater, nor its history in how it contributed to the foundation of our cultures.

Theater has immense power. It is a place where humans gather to live an aesthetic and political experience together. This power can transform consciousness, create bonds, and open horizons. But here, this power is perverted. There is a pretense. A discourse of tolerance is held lip-deep, but on the ground, at the entrance of the venue, what is really happening?

Toward protocols of trust

The Faro Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (2005), ratified by France in 2023, affirms the right of everyone to participate in the cultural life of their choice. It recognizes that citizens create heritage through their daily practices, that they are not mere passive recipients of a culture transmitted from above. This vision implies a complete reversal of the relationship between institutions and publics.

This reversal must manifest itself from the very threshold of cultural venues. Reception protocols based on trust rather than mistrust are possible. They already exist: some theaters, some museums, and libraries have chosen not to search bags, to let visitors enter freely, to treat them as responsible adults capable of living a collective experience without surveillance. These places are no more dangerous than others; they are simply more consistent with their stated values.

But to operate this change, we must first see what is at play. We must name the dramatization of mistrust to be able to deconstruct it. We must realize that theater begins long before the stage, in the way we welcome those who come. We must restore the place of speech—a speech that welcomes, explains, and allows for debate, rather than a speech that stuns or a silence that imposes. And we must accept that defending culture is not about defending a professional sector; it is about defending what culture can uniquely bring to the common good: trust in the other, openness to alterity, and the wager of a shared humanity.