What we avoid seeing when we defend culture

Calls to defend funding for arts and cultural education are multiplying in the face of budget cuts. While these commitments are legitimate, they often reveal a significant “unthought”: the absence of a critical analysis of our own practices and their real impact on the public.

The Urgency of Hermeneutics in Cultural Discourse

Faced with budget cuts that threaten arts and cultural education, professionals in the sector regularly mobilize to defend their funding. Their arguments invoke open-mindedness, cultural enrichment, and the “reparative cement” that art supposedly provides. These discourses are not false: theater, music, and the visual arts can indeed transform lives. However, in my view, they often reveal an absence of hermeneutics—that is, a critical analysis of our own practices and our own discourses. This absence strikes at a specific point of the work I strive to do and transmit through my many efforts in coaching professionals, because, unfortunately, a significant portion of the sector’s stakeholders does not devote enough time to it.

Pierre Bourdieu demonstrated this in Distinction (1979): legitimate culture also serves to mark and reproduce social positions. Without critical questioning, even the best intentions can participate in mechanisms of social reproduction. Discourses defending cultural budgets, even when sincere and well-founded, would benefit from integrating this reflexive dimension. It is not about questioning the value of art or the commitment of professionals, but about recognizing that the beneficial effect of a cultural project is never automatic.

Corporatism, present in all professional sectors, can drive this lack of self-questioning. In the artistic field specifically, the conviction that what we do is “brilliant” and will necessarily enrich people can prevent us from seeing the blind spots in our actions. We often assume that simply offering a quality cultural project will automatically—almost magically—have a positive effect on “audiences” (André Malraux’s famous “artistic wonder”). But we do not always sufficiently question the conditions of reception, the psychic journey of the people we claim to serve, or our own position in the chain of cultural transmission.

Cultural Coercion and Its Effects on Learning

I remember a professional day I helped organize on the theme of “culture and justice,” requested by justice sector actors to learn how to lead cultural projects and receive feedback from experience. At one point during the day, I felt a particular energy in the room: at the end of a panel I was moderating, where cultural project leaders were presenting their projects one after the other, I perceived a collective energy, a real problem among the listeners, a barrier beginning to form between the justice actors and the cultural actors. I therefore publicly articulated what I was feeling.

The cultural actors at the table seemed convinced that simply taking young people to a show was inherently good and emancipatory. They were focused on their own point of view, in their certainty of doing “good,” without sufficient awareness of the other and the other’s path (empathy). Notably, they overlooked the fact that young people, most often and especially in the judicial field, are forced to go see these shows—forced under threat of punishments that can be very severe, including outside the judicial field. Thus, they are brought to these places of potential emancipation by obligation, under constraint and threat. It is not in their interest to “talk back,” as they say, and cultural actors expect educators, youth workers, and teachers to maintain discipline, ensuring the youth behave and respect the codes. Often, any spontaneous expression is considered an affront to the artistic project.

Extensive work in neuroscience shows that when we are afraid—that is, when we feel threatened—our brain enters a protective mode against potential aggression and switches to reflex thinking. Olivier Houdé, a professor of developmental psychology, speaks in his work on cognitive inhibition (notably in *Learning to Resist*) about the impossibility of learning in a stressful situation. In those moments, it is impossible to take the time for what he calls cognitive resistance—the time necessary to create new neural connections against our protective reflex thinking. The time to open up and discover new things can only be a time without anxiety. For if we feel in danger, we shut down all our reception and learning processes to react quickly by reflex for self-protection, which is a perfectly healthy survival reaction.

I therefore remarked to the audience that it was necessary to recognize that a cultural project was not automatically positive in what it brought to young people under the hand of justice, as long as the psychic journey of these youth—and notably what we call psychosocial skills, of both the educators and the youth being supervised—was not taken into account. I felt that it greatly reassured the educators in the room that someone from the “culture world,” in this case me, recognized this reality, because they know it very well. When groups of young people find themselves forced to see a show or participate in a cultural project, when they are obligated to be there and know it is not in their interest to express their lack of interest, otherwise they would receive violence in return, the lived, received, and felt experience and enrichment are extremely low, if not counterproductive. The cultural experience can then become a form of endured violence, and its potential is certainly shut down. We must therefore rethink the way we mediate culture if we want it to serve something other than the reproduction of social domination processes.

The Unspoken Reality of Symbolic Violence

It seems important to me to be aware that, in the cultural milieu as well, there can be domination, and that here, as elsewhere, people can suffer destructive symbolic violence. This symbolic violence, to use Bourdieu’s concept, is unfortunately all the more effective because it presents itself as emancipatory. Paulo Freire, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, written in 1968 and published in 1974, had already identified this mechanism: “banking education,” where knowledge is deposited into the heads of people considered “empty,” is a form of oppression, even when it claims to liberate.

I therefore indicated that it was not enough to have a quality cultural project; one must above all provide quality support for the individuals within groups: listening, preparation, taking into account the dignity of each person being brought along, and support that acknowledges the singularity of each person’s journey. And that—that essential element—is not sufficiently present in many discourses defending cultural budgets. The question is not whether art has value; it profoundly does. The question is how we create the conditions so that this value can be received, lived, and appropriated by those we claim to serve.

But how do cultural projects actually benefit young people? Is it enough to go to the theater when one is forced to, when one hasn’t been prepared for it because the teacher no longer has training hours to gain the confidence needed to prepare students for the show? These questions are rarely asked in calls to defend budgets. We sometimes assume that artists are talented enough to produce an artistic epiphany in everyone. But what about those for whom the artistic epiphany does not occur? Those who “disturb”—how do we treat them? How do we consider them? Do we take an interest in them, do we take them into account? Too often, they are the “troublemakers” to be excluded, made invisible, or stigmatized.

Between Corporatism and Public Interest: Whom Are We Really Defending?

It is clear in certain attitudes that what is being defended, sometimes unconsciously, is the struggle against the quantitative loss of spectators, and thus against the loss of legitimacy for the funding of cultural venues. These visitors who are forced to attend are “spectators,” and they largely legitimize the existence of theaters and other cultural sites. It should be noted that “school groups,” as they are called, represent a very significant portion of the audience for many cultural venues.

Under the guise of defending the well-being of individuals—a well-being that is too little discussed, analyzed, or evaluated—one may actually be defending, even unconsciously, a profession that is afraid, seeing budgets for cultural actions shrinking. This is not a question of individual bad faith: most cultural professionals are sincerely committed to the common good. But institutional logic and economic survival stakes can blind us to the blind spots of our actions and harm the very work we believe we are doing.

This kind of discourse, when it lacks a self-critical dimension, can harm the cultural sector, postulating false certainties and hindering the evaluation of culture as a public policy. It can also reinforce the image of a self-centered sector while it claims not to be. Who, ultimately, does a discourse that does not question its real effectiveness serve? It serves the detractors of culture, because the absence of critical questioning facilitates arguments against public funding. This type of posture weakens the meaning of public funding for culture because it fails to refound it.

Toward a Humble and Dialogic Approach

In my view, what is needed is perhaps a bit more collective humility, and an attempt to understand why these types of budgets are decreasing. Instead of only wrapping ourselves in the defense of our vested interests, we could also question our work and take advantage of this crisis. Not to provide a stick to be beaten with, but to open a true space for dialogue with those who decide on budgetary orientations—proposing to dialogue and co-construct rather than trying, through a power struggle, to impose a vision that no longer necessarily enjoys consensus. Cultural actors no longer have the political power they once had.

This dialogic approach aligns with what I have defended throughout my career: the need to move from a logic of “cultural democratization,” where experts bring culture to the masses, to a logic of “cultural democracy,” where everyone is recognized as a bearer of culture and where cultural institutions place themselves at the service of everyone’s expression. This distinction, developed notably by UNESCO’s work since the 1970s and reflected in the values of “cultural rights” for over twenty years, is not just a terminological nuance: it involves an entire relationship with the public and methods of work between professionals, a whole conception of the role of cultural institutions and the postures of cultural actors.

Let us open the dialogue. Let us step out of the postures of “know-it-alls” who, believing they are defending democracy, actually position themselves solely as defenders of corporate interests. These attitudes may actually express panic in the face of a loss of social recognition, in the face of a world that is evolving and questioning certainties we once held. Perhaps this is precisely the moment to reinvent ourselves, to rethink our social utility—not in a defensive logic, but in a constructive one.

Toward a Sincere Evaluation

What we need in the cultural sector is not only calls to defend our budgets, but also and above all a true evaluation of the impact of our actions. An evaluation that does not settle for counting spectators, but that truly questions the lived experience, the respect for the dignity of persons, and the consideration of their psychic and social journeys. An evaluation that accepts, with sincerity, that sometimes our projects can do more harm than good when they are not accompanied by the necessary attention and humility.

Cultural rights, inscribed since 2015 in French law (NOTRe law), provide a framework for rethinking our action: they recognize that every person has the right to participate in the cultural life of their choice, in respect of their dignity. It is not a “duty” to be forced to attend shows, even quality ones. It is the right to be supported and accompanied in one’s unique cultural journey, with kindness and respect.

This sincere evaluation is not a weakness; on the contrary, it is what can refound the legitimacy of public cultural action. By accepting to question ourselves, by documenting what works and what does not, by truly listening to those we claim to serve, we can build much stronger arguments to defend our funding. Not on the basis of a presupposed cultural superiority, but on the basis of demonstrated social utility—of a service rendered to people in respect of their dignity and their own aspirations.